Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought by Mary Evans


Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought
Title : Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0745614760
ISBN-10 : 9780745614762
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 176
Publication : First published January 15, 1991

This introductory textbook offers a concise and lucid account of the main developments in contemporary feminist thinking, and demonstrates the centrality of feminist thought to all areas of intellectual enquiry. In a wide-ranging discussion, Evans argues that most accounts of the world since the Enlightenment have been constructed in terms of a distinction between the public and the private which excluded women. Using both historical and more recent examples, she examines the breadth and complexity of feminist thinking, focusing on key themes such as the body, representation, engendering knowledge, and the relationship between women and the state. Evans argues that feminist thought seeks less to add to existing theory than to re-theorize the social and symbolic worlds; no contemporary account of these worlds, she suggests, is complete without a discussion of the implications of gender difference. This book offers a clear and coherent guide to contemporary feminism for students of women's studies, gender studies, sociology, social theory and literary theory.

Introducing Contemporary Feminist Thought Reviews

  • Meg

    Generally a good overview of feminist theory. The title is accurate in that the book sticks to feminist 'thought', and focuses largely on women's studies as an academic discipline, with little attention given to action or activism in the women's movement.
    Evans deals mostly with the 1970s onward, without covering the influences of feminist thought in writers in previous centuries (unlike A Very Short Introduction to Feminism, which starts with women religious such as Hildegard of Bingen and their insistence on women's ability to access the divine). I think this is a strength, though; it allows her to go more in-depth into the many rapid developments in feminist thought which have taken place in just a few decades.
    The one area (given what little knowledge of the field that I do have) that Evans seems to give short shrift is the ways in which critical race theory and feminist theory have overlapped; there is little discussion of black feminism, chicana feminism, etc. I wonder somewhat if this is due to her coming out of the British context as opposed to the American context, where the specifics of race relations in the U.S. made race a more central issue for feminists at the end of the 1970s. (Though really, Britain has its full share of race issues, so I would expect it to deserve the attention either way.)

  • Fer

    No estoy segura del año de publicación inicial (en los 90's), pero estoy segura que este libro será de mucha utilidad para las personas que como yo, queremos expandir nuestros conocimientos hacia el feminismo y las cuestiones de "género". Aborda puntualmente y de forma general cuestiones como las representaciones sociales, "género" y corporalidad entre otros y aunque su resumido recuento histórico devenga del S. XIX para acá (y muy superficialmente, enfocado en autoras como Austen y Brönte como un punto de análisis sobre la progresiva inclusión de la mujer en labores antes exclusivas de lo masculino), nos brinda una cuantiosa bibliografía de los temas que aborda para que el lector pueda revisar esos textos y sacar lecturas más específicas que pudiesen complementar lo dicho en cada capitulo.