FEMINIST THEORY IN PRACTICE AND PROCESS

A survey of recent major developments within feminist theory and analysis, this collection captures a period of transition in women’s scholarship, from the examination of confining categories and constructs to the self-reflective development of feminist theory. The fourteen essays in this volume provide critical application of the practices of complicating gender, raising consciousness, engaging contradictions, transforming women’s experiences, and naming the politics of theory. As they reject the nation of a single feminist theory, the contributors to this volume directly and eloquently argue that multiplicity must be embedded within the concept of theory itself—that theory is a process, not unlike a conversation, with ideas interconnecting and reconfiguring within a myriad of feminist practices. Individual essays explore postmodernism and gender relations in feminist theory, the context of a black feminist ideology, sexual violence and literary history, racism and feminist aesthetics, the lesbian literary imagination, and critical theory and women’s social practices.

Micheline R. Malson is assistant professor in public policy at Duke University and an associate editor of Signs.
Jean F. O’Barr is director, Duke University Women’s Studies Program, and the editor of Signs.
Sarah Westphal-Wihl is assistant professor in the comparative literature program at McGill University and an associate editor of Signs.
Mary Wyer is the managing editor of Signs.