Uneven Developments

The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

Author: Mary Poovey
ISBN: 0226675300

Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of source

Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publish Date: 1988-12-15

Subjects: Social Science / General, Social Science / Women's Studies, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, History / Europe / Western

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: History)