Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books Somer Brodribb. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 199Z Distributed by New York University Press, xxx +178 pp. ISBN 1-875559-07-8 (pb); $15.00. Turning a critical eye to masculinist assumptions in postmodern theory, Brodribb asserts that postmodernism is yet another version of the Master Narrative which produces both amnesia and aphasia among women scholars . Trained as a political sdentist, Brodribb diarts the political context of leading male theorists beginning with Levi-Strauss and Sartre's potency of absence, Foucaulf s epistemology of annihilation as the order of things, Derrida and Foucaulf s warning on the shame of origin, Lacan and Irigaray's ethics of absence, and Lacan and de Sade7s articulation of creativity and murder. Having bowed down at the feet of male theorists, woman has compromised her freedom, set woman against woman, thereby insuring the devaluation of her work and preduding the possibility of devdoping woman-centered theory and practice. Brodribb urges scholars to examine the masculinist strategies and misogynistic assumptions inherent in postmodern theory. Hélène Cixous. "Coming to Write" and Other Essays. Edited by Deborah Jenson. Translated by Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers, mtrodurtory essay by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1991. xxii + 214 pp. ISBN 0-67414436 -8 (d); 0-674-14437-6 (pb); $24.95 (d); $10.95 (pb). These collected essays share as themes the gendering of the written word and the concomitant displacement of identity of a woman who writes. The title essay, the book's longest, explores these themes through an obliqudy autobiographical meditation on Cixous7s own coming to write. Three of the remaining essays employ the fictions of Clarice Lispertor as a mirror for Cixous's concerns. Another piece takes the form of a confrontation with the gendered plotting of Jerusalem Delivered in both Tasso7s verse form and Rossini's opera; another explores the different impetus between written and painted works of art. Cixous's essays repeatedly reference and playfully parody a wide range of historically masculine discourses, especially Freudian psychology and Hadeggerian ontology, but her approach is more lyrical than historical. Suleiman's introduction and Jenson's concluding essay recap Cixous's major themes and place these essays in both her life and work. © 1993 Journal of Womens History, Vol. 5 No. ι (Spring)_________________ 144 Journal of Women's History Spring Laura E. Donaldson. Decolonmng Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building . Chapd Hill: University of North Ourolina Press, 1992. 175 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2044-X (d); 0-8078-4382-2 (pb); $29.95 (d); $10.95 (pb). Decolonizing feminism requires eliminating what Donaldson calls the '"Miranda effect": the feminist tendency to universalize and totalize, to assume a solidarity among all women that ignores differences of class, race, and history—a blindness comparable to Miranda's inability to see Caliban. Donaldson argues that a decolonized feminism must be both contextual and intertextual: situating texts in relationship both to their times and to the discursive practices that shape them. Donaldson finds an especially ridi vein for sudi a method by interpreting films against their original written texts (The Jung and I against Leonowen's diaries and Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Australian film We of the Never Never against its memoir sources in one essay, against the 'Ticcaninnies" oÃ- Peter Pan in another; the inscription of imperialism in film and novd versions of Passage to India). In other essays, Donaldson reads Jane Eyre against both Gilbert and Gubar7s madwoman and Spivak7s complicit slaver, treats Zora Neale Hurston's revisioning of Moses, and seeks to lay the groundwork for a feminist-materialist semiotics. Hester Eisenstein. Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.138 pp. ISBN 0-8070-6762-8 (d); 0-80706763 -6 (pb); $18.95 (d); $1Z00 (pb). Drawing upon her experiences working as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer for the Department of Education in the state of New South Wales, Australia, Eisenstein offers insights into differences she sees in the practice of feminism in Australia and the United States. Whereas feminism in the United States has followed a heavily theoretical, academic track, Eisenstein observes that Australian...