The Female Complaint

The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Author: Lauren Berlant
ISBN: 9780822342021

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm i

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 2008-03-17

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory, Social Science / Women's Studies

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