Cultural Feminism Research Articles

Reviews: History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Families of the King, Writing Identity in the, a History of Old English Literature, Imagining Robin Hood, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions, Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright, Shakespeare and Republicanism, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought, Gentility and the

Reviews: History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Families of the King, Writing Identity in the, a History of Old English Literature, Imagining Robin Hood, Elizabethan Triumphal Processions, Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright, Shakespeare and Republicanism, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy, Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought, Gentility and the

Women and Dixie: The Feminization of Southern Women's History and Culture

In the early 1980s, when I spent some months raking through the Louisiana State and Tulane University archives reading unpublished materials by southern women writers about the Civil War, I was astonished by the weight of that material and the fact it had rarely been examined. As I completed my own research, Anne Goodwyn Jones published her path-breaking study, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981), which charted connections between southern women and began to demonstrate a lineage of their writings which burgeoned around that most significant war. I was also sharing an office with one of the researchers for the mammoth project focused on Mary Boykin Chesnut, led by C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, which resulted in two major tomes, between 1981 and 1984, of her edited diaries and a biography of the writer. The recognition of the importance of Chesnut was a timely reminder of women's complex role in subsequent interpretations and understandings of the Civil War and its aftermath, opening scholarly doors to lesser known figures such as Belle Boyd, Sherwood Bonner, Augusta Evans, Frances Harper, and Mary Johnston, whose war writings (be they life histories, diaries, or fiction) were edited and reprinted for new markets. The recent vogue for life writings of all kinds, besides favoring slave and freedwomen's narratives, as well as conventional autobiographical writings by established writers such as Ellen Glasgow, has given particular prominence to the journals and diaries of white 61ite women who wrote their versions of wartime and Reconstruction

What Women Will Have Been: Reassessing Feminist Cultural Production in China: A Review Essay

Previous articleNext article No AccessWhat Women Will Have Been: Reassessing Feminist Cultural Production in China: A Review EssaySasha Su‐Ling WellandSasha Su‐Ling WellandDepartments of Anthropology and Women StudiesUniversity of Washington Search for more articles by this author Departments of Anthropology and Women StudiesUniversity of WashingtonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 31, Number 4Summer 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/500602 Views: 301Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref © 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Big Feminism: The Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of Signs, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no.11 (Oct 2022): v–vii.https://doi.org/10.1086/723008 Big Feminism: The Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of Signs, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no.44 (Jun 2022): v–vii.https://doi.org/10.1086/718902Ling Han Alternative Media and the Queer Feminist Community: The Lesbian Print Magazine in China, Journal of Homosexuality 5 (Jul 2021): 1–24.https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2021.1940013 Xianfeng Beijing, (Apr 2018): 43–78.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-003 Showcase Beijing, (Apr 2018): 79–107.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-004 The Besieged City, (Apr 2018): 111–134.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-005 The Hinterlands of Feminist Art, (Apr 2018): 135–176.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-006 Red Detachment, (Apr 2018): 179–205.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-007 Opening the Great Wall, (Apr 2018): 206–235.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-008 Camouflaged Histories, (Apr 2018): 236–264.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-009 Prologue, (Apr 2018): 1–5.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-014 Introduction, (Apr 2018): 7–40.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-002 Epilogue, (Apr 2018): 265–273.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-010 Notes, (Apr 2018): 275–303.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-011 Bibliography, (Apr 2018): 305–321.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372479-012Nan Z. Da and Wang Zheng Feminist Sinologies: An IntroductionEdited by Nan Z. Da and Wang Zheng, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no.33 (Jun 2015): 545–562.https://doi.org/10.1086/679610Yiu Fai Chow Moving, Sensing Intersectionality: A Case Study of Miss China Europe Chow, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no.22 (Jul 2015): 411–436.https://doi.org/10.1086/656023Jeroen De Kloet Gendering China Studies, China Information 22, no.22 (Jul 2008): 195–219.https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X08091544

The Album as Museum? A Response to Patrizia di Bello on an Interdisciplinary Approach to Mrs Birkbeck's Album

This review develops Patrizia di Bello's model of the album as female collection outlined in her article ‘Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture'. The review explores the practice of Victorian women's album-making in the context of ideas about collecting and the nineteenth-century museum. It argues that such albums both appropriate and subvert aspects of museum practice. Mrs Birkbeck's album challenges the idea of a traditional, chronological display but it utilises the juxtapositional elements inherent in museum exhibition to great interpretive effect.

‘Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned’: Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in Late Nineteenth‐Century Britain

This article uses photographs of student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to examine the material culture of everyday life at these institutions in late nineteenth‐century Britain. Male and female student rooms are compared, revealing the impact of gender on nineteenth‐century student life. Both male and female student rooms were anxiously surveyed by the college authorities. Under pressure from a hostile media to conform to a feminine culture, institutions for the higher education of women deliberately displayed feminine decor. But students did not always follow suit: both male and female students decorated their rooms in styles conventionally associated with the opposite sex. Men and women used ‘artistic’ decor to differentiate their rooms from those of their fellow students, but these spaces are not easy to read. The meaning of such decorative choices was altered by the gendered context in which they were practised.

Young People's Constructions of the Self

This article looks at the ways in which young people reflexively construct their self within a rapidly changing society. Drawing on texts written by young people aged 14–17 years, it explores the existence of patterns identified by theorists of late modernity as regards relationships, fateful moments, a search for authenticity, life plans and life styles and looks at gender-differentiated trends in these areas drawing on a ‘weak cultural feminist tradition’ (Evans, 1995: 91).These texts are part of a sub-sample of approximately 34,000 texts written by young people in a school context in response to an invitation to ‘tell their life stories’ by writing a page ‘describing themselves and the Ireland they inhabit’.The article suggests that gender is a repressed but crucially important framework in the construction of young people's sense of self, while also identifying areas where consumer society is eroding gender difference.

Writing Aphrodite: Imagining a Rhetoric of Desire for a Feminist Writing Course

F a long time it has seemed to me that much of the academic writing our students do has something missing; at its worst, it can have a sameness, a lack of feeling and aesthetic qualities, a general joylessness in its language, and a repetitiveness in its worn out discourse forms. Many of my students agree: “After you’ve written for a couple of years, you get the forms–introduction, ideas, and conclusion. That’s all you can really do. . . . I always read a page and think, ‘God, this is really boring.’” Another one characterized her academic writing as “conveyer-belt” papers. She preferred the first drafts that she habitually concealed from teachers: “I like to save my first drafts because I find them interesting. I don’t think teachers would share my appreciation of them!”1 Certainly, we have a contemporary tradition of varying academic writing, which can potentially enliven it, beginning perhaps in 1980 with the insights of Winston Weathers. Since then, rhetorical scholars have retheorized a place for style in the classroom (Johnson, Rhetoric; Johnson and Pace; Williams), proposed alternative discourses (Bishop; Bridwell-Bowles; Starkey), revalorized personal writing (Harris; Holdstein and Bleich; Nash; Spigelman), rethought the role of emotion in writing (Brand; Davis; Jacobs and Micciche; McLeod), and revised historical views of western discourse so that it appears far less logocentric than it once did (Glenn; Jarratt; Poulakos). However, very little of this work has actually transferred to the average college classroom. What’s more, I have also noticed the continuing difficulties that many women students have in doing academic writing and participating in the writing classroom. Cultural feminists such as Cixous and Clement, Irigaray, Lorde, hooks, and Daly once theorized alternative discourses that drew on women’s ways of knowing as a means both to enable women to speak and write more fully and to rebalance a discourse gendered male. Of course, feminist theorists (and rhetorical theorists) were not the only ones attempting to describe alternative rhetorics. Diane P. Freedman summarizes a confluence of similar propositions:

Playfully negotiated activity in girls’ talk

This paper examines how playful language functions in the friendship talk of preadolescent girls. The corpus on which the investigation is based is audio-taped interactions between peer girlfriends. The analytical focus is on speaker's negotiation of talk in and out of play and non-play. It is argued that these playful forms of speaking are particularly salient at this life stage and that the talk of preadolescent girls mirrors their shifting allegiances. These interactional practices show remnants of earlier childhood discourse whilst also presaging future practices resulting in a marked oscillating key. The methodology is synthesised from interactional sociolinguistics, cultural feminist ethnography and Conversational Analysis approaches. Findings demonstrate that alliance building is accomplished in a diversity of forms that contribute to the overall game-like key of preadolescent girls’ talk. Some of the selected resources foreshadow documented cooperative interactive practices associated with women. However, one of the chief findings is that alliance building is not confined to supportive behaviours. Episodes of playful confrontation, name-calling and insulting sequences are highly prominent in these data and contribute to locating the talk as distinct from that of earlier childhood and adult discourse. Results are discussed in terms of their contribution to the literature on older children's language use.

Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The Hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture

Mrs Birkbeck's Album, collected between 1825 and 1847 by the wife of the founder of the College, contains poems, songs and other texts, as well as drawings and watercolours by famous women and men of her time. Like the collections that aristocratic women were able to spread over galleries and libraries, the album formed and displayed her taste, showcasing her husband's reputation and the cultural and political circles in which the couple moved. Several contributors to her album also worked for annuals, fashionable publications associated with a debased, commercialised feminine culture. Unlike these mechanically produced pages, Mrs Birkbeck's album, marked by individual hands rather than by printing presses, is the result of gift exchanges, removed from the world of commodified culture, even as it partakes of its glamour. Recent publications have explored the emergence of women's magazines, but little consideration has been given to album making. In this paper I explore the social meanings of Mrs Birkbeck's interest in albums. To facilitate a close reading of its individual pages, I am working towards digitising the album, in collaboration with Birkbeck Library and the Vasari Lab in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media.

Journalism and Feminist Cultural Studies: Retrieving the Missing Citizen Lost in the Female Audience

This article explores the relations between journalism and feminist cultural studies to underscore the crucial importance of studying forms of popular knowledge that claim to foster citizenship among audiences. The article begins by examining the history of feminist cultural studies scholars' sustained interest in feminine genres of popular culture rather than journalism. Crossing over to the other side, I then outline some of the reasons for journalism's early resistance to cultural studies and trace new developments that suggest the growing acceptance of cultural studies within the institutional apparatus of journalism. As a case study, news magazines' representations of globalization illustrate the distinct ways in which journalism employs discourses of gender to produce hegemonic ideas of modernity, prosperity, and achievement for global reading publics. Finally, the article points to new directions for international audience research in the arena of globalization, gender, and journalism.

Whatever Happened to the Cultural Feminists? Martha Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain

In 1991, Martha Boesing, cofounder of At the Foot of the Mountain in Minneapolis, declared, “I'm not [just] a cultural feminist. I was a Marxist before these girls were even born!” The “girls” to whom she was referring were the critics whose negative response to the performance of the multicultural collaborative piece The Story of a Mother II at the Women and Theatre Program in Chicago in 1987 marked a decisive clash between competing notions of feminism in American theatre. Boesing later owned her own cultural feminism, as well as her Marxist evocation to action, but the conflict between cultural feminists (who sought performance as a means of building communities) and materialist feminists (who resisted being constructed as part of universalized womanhood) resulted in a divide that ultimately affected the reception and hence the historical impact of At the Foot of the Mountain. From their founding in 1974 to this performance in 1991, Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain had been featured both in critical literature and at theatre conferences, hailed for their application of consciously articulated feminist politics in the creative process of their plays. After Chicago, they lost momentum as subjects of study in critical scholarship.

Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture

Contemporary Japanese society has seen the emergence of aesthetically conscious young men who employ ‘feminine’ aesthetics and strategies as ways of exploring and practising new masculine identities. In this paper, I explore the significance of this emerging trend of male beauty by observing and analysing the expressions, strategies and intentions of those young men who have taken to aesthetically representing themselves in these ways. This cultural trend is often described as the ‘feminization of masculinity,’ echoing the gendered articulation of rising mass culture in terms of the ‘feminization of culture,’ which acknowledges aspects of the commercialization of masculine bodies in Japan of the 1990s onward. While this view successfully links important issues, such as femininity, beauty, and the gendered representation of the self in a broader context of capitalist culture, it does not sufficiently convey a sense of agency in the young men's lively practices of exploring and expressing new masculine values and ideals. Rather than viewing ‘feminization’ simply as a sign of commodification, I argue that these young men strategically distance themselves from conventional masculinity by artificially standing in the position of the ‘feminine’, where they can more freely engage in the creation of alternative gender identities. From this point of view, the use of the phrase ‘feminization of masculinity’ often implies a fear and anxiety on the part of patriarchy over the boundary‐crossing practice that seriously challenges the stability of gendered cultural hegemony. Moreover, such anxiety driven reactions easily merge with nationalist inclination, as those threatened tend to seek the consolidation of patriarchal/hegemonic order by eliminating ambiguities and indeterminacy in cultural/national discourse. I conclude that the cultural hegemony of contemporary Japan could better sustain itself by incorporating non‐hegemonic gender identities, which would allow it maintain an open space for critical imagination and effectively diffuse an obsessive and ultimately self‐destructive desire for transparency/identity.

Whatever Happened to The Women's Movement?

Analyses of the women's movement that focus on its "waves" and theories of social movements that focus on contentious politics have encouraged the view that the women's movement is in decline. Employing alternative perspectives on social movements, we show that the women's movement continues to thrive. This is evidenced by organizational maintenance and growth, including the international expansion of women's movement organizations; feminism within institutions and other social movements; the spread of feminist culture and collective identity; and the variety of the movement's tactical repertoires. Moreover, the movement remains capable of contentious collective action. We argue for research based on broader conceptions of social movements as well as the contentious politics approach.

LEARNING DESIRE Relational Pedagogies and the Desiring Female Subject in Lebanon

While many scholars have cautioned against the possibility of defining, representing or containing desire (Todd 1997: 6; Goodheart 1991: 2), the assumption that the desiring subject is an individual has generally stood. Much scholarship in the United States, informed by liberalist political philosophy, has tended to link the identification and experience of a person's (female or male) authentic desires with the development of an autonomous, bounded, separative self. Even among scholars critical of the individualist construct of self and attuned to theorizing a more subject, or at least a female subject (Chodorow 1978; Flax 1993), relationality has given way to autonomy in discussions of desire. Cultural feminists, the most committed of feminist scholars of subjectivity (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan, Lyons, and Hanmer 1990; Ruddick 1989), have struggled to accommodate relationality to agential desire (agency being commonly equated with the autonomous self). The construct of relational individualism has been offered, in feminist therapeutic discourses, as a healthy balance between the perceived equally dysfunctional extremes of relationality and autonomy. In this therapeutic resolution, the emphasis is, nevertheless, on the female subject knowing her own desires as distinct from those of others (Radden 1996). Rich and extensive as the literature on desire and the desiring female subject has become (Deleuze and Guatarri 1984; Butler 1987, 1994, 1995; Dickey 1996; Goodchild 1996; Kaye 1992; Kristeva 1980, 1984; Lichtman 1982; Martel 2001;

A View from the Margin: Interior Design

About ten years ago, after nearly a decade of practice as an designer, returned to school to work on a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary humanities. In my first semester, was, perhaps, a bit over zealous and enrolled in a philosophy course whose subject was Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. was intellectually rusty after being away from school for so long, and this class was very difficult. New jargon and concepts had sprung up since my last academic experience, and found that was hanging on the professor's every word just so could understand. But studied hard, read diligently, and was doing well. was required to do a presentation in class, so met with the professor just to be sure was on the right track. In that meeting, we quickly got into an extremely stimulating discussion of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, which was my topic. It was one of those animated discussions that every grad student and professor long for. was elated that was able to hold my own in the discussion, and perhaps because could, the instructor paused in our conversation to ask about my background. In my description of myself, mentioned that was an and from that moment everything changed. My professor abruptly ended our previous conversation, and started asking for my advice about decorating her living room. Although tried to get the conversation back on its previous track, could not. Somewhat discouraged, decided to leave and our interview ended, not with closing remarks on Nietzsche or my presentation, but with my professor commenting: I have always admired you girls like my mother and sister who have the knack for picking colors. 1 Considering my instructor was both a woman and a feminist, was incredulous that this conversation had taken such a turn. had encountered many people in the past with preconceived ideas about me because of my identity as an designer, but had never seen it shift so remarkably right in front of my eyes. The ability of the label interior designer to do that indicated to me that something very powerful was in play. The fact that my professor, who seemingly was sensitive to issues of sexism, could not recognize the same embedded in her own statement made me realize just how strong and obscured this power was. As a graduate student and later as a professor teaching design, have long attempted to understand this phenomenon. From an investigation that is situated in both my personal experience It is important to note here that the same stereotypes assigned to women as designers are equally inscribed in stereotypes of gay men. The elision of the feminine, decoration, the interior, and the inferior was put firmly in place in the early modern movement not only by the anti-decorative invectives of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, but by a large societal discussion and concern about the issue referred to as degeneration. At the turn of the century, legitimate scholars as well as pseudo-scientists from all fields theorized that the new conditions of modernity indicated that society was devolving or degenerating. The reason for this degeneration generally was recognized as the feminization of culture. In degeneration theory, the feminine represented the primitive, base, and erotic urges of society that had to be suppressed in order for society to evolve and progress rationally. All indications of the feminine, therefore, were perceived as inferior. The perception that gay men are feminized men links them automatically with the same inferiority assigned to both women and decoration. Like stereotypes of women and decoration, the stereotype of the gay man as decorator still is strongly inscribed in the public's perception and equally as undeconstructed. Since this article speaks mainly from my personal viewpoint and experiences as a woman, it will not deal specifically with issues of this stereotype, although it is equally important and relevant to this discussion. (See my article Decoration as Modernism's Other: (Re)Reading the Texts of Early Modern Architecture and Design in Cultural and Artistic Upheavals in Modem Europe: 1848-1945(Cummer Studies, Vol. 1, 1996) for a more complete discussion of the origins of these stereotypes).

Fertile Cosmofeminism

In an era of globalization, are women the ideal subjects without borders? Mythologizing the role of women around the world, the poetry of the Japanese homemaker Nakagaki Sachiko suggests that women embody transcultural values from the moment they embrace particular ideologies of femininity. Eliding female desires with romantic love, maternal concern, and sentimental longing, the poem Have No Need of Borders asserts that the private world of cultural feminism offers the clearest public possibilities for an avant-garde global identity. Women stand at the forefront of transnational forms of life, and as the rhetoric of childbearing suggests, they control the reproduction of this world without borders. In this essay, I explore how cosmopolitan feminist visions of motherhood and fertility emerge in the fiction of the Japanese American writer Ruth L. Ozeki. In Ozeki's work, the world of female fertility and maternity

Encounter with Sacred Eros

Situating art therapy within a cultural feminist postmodern framework, has taught me how valuable it is to re-write and re-image our histories, so that we are not imprisoned in the story. Veronique's art therapy process was a creative re-writing, imaging, and singing her song alive, which grieved the loss of her innocence. In honouring her grief she was able to embrace life again, and give personal and collective meaning to her suffering. This article has attempted to contextualise the impact of real relationships on psychic life. My therapeutic experience of relationship with Veronique, represented a most profound encounter with another, which was about grounding the journey of exploring the emotional waters of the heart and finding the place of soul.

REVIEWS

Books reviewed:Antony Copley (ed.), Hinduism in Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, and SampradayJames D.G. Dunn and John Rogerson (eds), Eerdmans Commentary on the BibleJohn Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic SketchMusimbi R.A. Kanyoro, Introducing Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics: An African PerspectiveEryl W. Davies, The Dissenting Reader: Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew BibleRalph McInerny, AquinasSarah Borden, Edith SteinM.F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the 18th CenturyStephen Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for CommunionPaul Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church: Reception, Communion and the Ordination of WomenDonald Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western EyesWallace M. Alston, Jr. and Michael Welker (eds), Reformed Theology: Identity and EcumenicityJohn G. Stackhouse, Jr. (ed.), Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion?Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the WestJoerg Rieger (ed.), Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian TheologyAndrew Wright, Religion, Education and PostmodernityKarl Ernst Nipkow, God, Human Nature and Education for Peace: New Approaches to Moral and Religious MaturityHenrique Pinto, Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith DialogueViggo Mortensen (ed.), Theology and the Religions: A DialogueMichael L. Peterson and Raymond J. Vanarragon (eds), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of ReligionPamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (eds), Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical ReadingsBruno Forte, The Essence of ChristianityJean‐Louis Chrétien, The Ark of SpeechDavid Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of the Christian FaithGerald O’Mahony, A Way into the Trinity: The Story of a JourneyPeter Byrne, God and RealismSimon Francis Gaine, ‘Will There Be Freedom in Heaven?’: Freedom, Impeccability and BeatitudeMichael Washburn, Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred WorldMichael Breen, Eamonn Conway, Barry McMillan, (eds), Technology and TranscendenceAlan G. Padgett, Science and the Study of God: A Mutuality Model for Theology and ScienceAnne Primavesi, Gaia's Gift: Earth, Ourselves and God after CopernicusEric O. Jacobsen, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian FaithGerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and TheologyKathryn Rountree, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist‐Ritual Makers in New Zealand

“Her Say” in the Media Mainstream: A Cultural Feminist Manifesto

The “Her Say” column of the “Womanews” section in the Chicago Tribune functioned as an editorial to position the new women's section and provide women-centered perspectives on issues. Written by women from outside the Tribune staff during its 1991 launch, “Her Say” spoke in voices drawn from the larger women's community, often harkening back to earlier notions of gender to bring forward concepts and rework them to fit American women in the 1990s. Using sex difference and privileging sisterhood, “Her Say” articulated the terms of a separate women's culture, the bounds of which continued to be defined by newspapers across the nation as they introduced their own women's sections. Through “Her Say” this section signaled a shift in the media paradigm from liberal feminism to a cultural feminist approach, which called for a reconnection among women through women's media in the media mainstream. The myth for the 1990s that emerged from “Her Say” was that of a world-weary prodigal daughter returning to the hearth. As the mouthpiece for the “Womanews” section, “Her Say” heralded a revaluing of “woman,” and challenged the industry to hasten its redefinition of “news” for 21st -century relevancy.

Toward a Critical Feminist Perspective of Culture and Self

The overall aim of this article is to provide a critical feminist perspective of culture and self. Five main points of view are presented. First, cultural feminists’ essentialist claims of ‘gendered’ experience for all women are critiqued. Second, a deconstructive reading of essentialist self from postmodern feminist perspective is discussed. Third, the ongoing critique of western autonomous self is critically reviewed. Fourth, a further deconstructive reading of dualist thinking in cultural literature is suggested. Finally, a critical feminist perspective and its implications to feminist research and clinic work are provided.