Imagining Women [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION: ON IMAGINING WOMEN This book is about women's images and images of women. It addresses writing and reading, creativity and imagination, image making and interpretation, subjectivity and self-representation. The title, Imagining Women, was chosen (as were the others in the series) in the recognition that it is unfixed, that it slides as it is read. One moment women are being imagined, and the next are doing the imagining. In this way the very title is characteristic of the field of women's studies. CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS The book's subtitle, 'Cultural Representations and Gender', indicates its concern with one of the first areas where women's studies began critical work - cultural representation. This was roughly concurrent with the spread of another area, known, initially in the UK, as cultural studies. The 'culture' that was being studied was not that known as high culture, but a much wider field which looked at everyday life and was informed by a consideration of the culture industry and all its products, especially the neglected and castigated area of popular culture. The two interdisciplinary areas (women's studies and cultural studies) interacted and were frequently complementary. For instance, the concern with popular culture echoed the concern in the women's movement with the activities and interests of 'ordinary women'. Most of the articles in this book could be described as examples of feminist cultural studies. They are concerned with the processes of production, dissemination and consumption of texts; they ask questions about how audiences (and particularly female audiences) use texts, how meaning is made from them and how they are incorporated into everyday life. There is also a special concern with how they evolve and grow from everyday life. In referring to cultural representation, this book looks at how women are represented, how we represent ourselves, and what we do with the representations we encounter. It is important to note the distinction between representation and reflection. The latter term is not used in this book because it implies that there is a direct correspondence between phenomena (events, people, things) in the 'real' world and their appearance in texts. Representation, however, indicates that some kind of modulation or interpretive If 1