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Generations Academic Feminists in Dialogue Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan, editors |
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Explores the conflicts and challenges facing older and younger feminist scholars. In universities and colleges across the country, feminists are debating their histories and future legacies, often expressing these controversies in generational terms. Some older, second wave feminists accuse younger ones of being careerist, overly theoretical, insufficiently political, and not grateful enough to previous generations. Some third wave feminists consider their foremothers naive, universalizing, or elitist, resentful of deviations from their established plans and improperly wielding their power. Generations addresses these divisions and impasses through sophisticated analyses of the challenges of "passing the torch." Generations is composed of essays from academic women at various professional stages—from established scholars to junior professors to graduate students. Some are concerned with telling intergenerational feminist histories based on both research and experience. Others describe difficulties faced by feminists of all ages in the academy today. A final cluster considers issues in the highly charged convergence of feminist theory and postmodernism. The promise of feminisms yet to come can be found in these pages, alongside some of the most resonant and important feminist voices of the last two decades. Generations both complicates and enlivens the transmission and rebirth of feminist knowledges from one generation to another. "Generations offers a constructive antidote to handwringing and fingerpointing: here is a collection that isn't afraid to confront power and the economics of class privilege that seem to structure academic feminism. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan give us a vocabulary for articulating our more than generational gaps. Bringing academic feminists across generations together in one volume, they attempt cross-generational dialogue about the anxieties enumerated above." —Women's Review of Books Contributors: Diane Elam, Elizabeth Francis, Linda Frost, Jane Gallop, Dana Heller, Jane Kalbfleisch, Jeanne Marecek, Nancy K. Miller, Mona Narain, Angela M. S. Nelson, Judith Newton, Rebecca Dakin Quinn, Gita Rajan, Judith Roof, Theresa Ann Sears, Ruthe Thompson, Michele Wallace, Barbara A. White, and Lynda Zwinger. Devoney Looser is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. E. Ann Kaplan is professor of English and comparative studies and director of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. 296 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1997 |
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$26.00 Paper