Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T01:31:43.273Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Gender and sexuality

from Part III - Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Walter Kalaidjian
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Get access

Summary

In the past twenty years, the voluminous work done by scholars of feminism, gender, and sexuality has helped to restructure the field of modernist scholarship. Women writers who had been excluded from canonical consideration have become the subjects of extensive literary study; gay and lesbian networks that had been cursorily overlooked or underread have been revalued as matrices of modernist aesthetic experimentation; recent theoretical elaborations of sexual identity and gender formation have been put to use in new and sometimes startlingly revisionary interpretations of modernist texts. The sources of these new paths of inquiry have been many. Some were groundbreaking works of historical scholarship, like John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's 1988 account of American sexuality, Intimate Matters, or Nancy Cott's 1987 study, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Feminist reconsiderations of canon formation, popular culture, and the sociological force of women's burgeoning entry into public life owe debts to foundational works like Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank (1986), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's three-volume study, No Man's Land (1988-1994), and Ann Ardis's New Women, New Novels (1990). Perhaps one of the most farreaching essays from this period of scholarship, in terms of the wide debates it immediately produced, was Andreas Huyssen's “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other” (1986), which triangulated the relations among mass culture, modernism, and gender with its provocative claim that turn of the century mass culture was “consistently and obsessively” gendered as feminine by a male-dominated high culture.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×