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reviews 173 makers' intentions, and pornographic films in which the actresses teach us how to be hot, as restituting. Consider the films that portray the women spoilers, the sdf-oppressors and the oppressors of others as pitiable examples. Suppose, in the narrative, all of the above women escape punishment and get what they want instead of the usual finish which leaves the vidous trounced and the defiant outcasts. Suppose all ofthese films were shot as if they took place on an allegorical piazza where there was no private sphere and voyeurism was all but impossible with the most uncompromising anti-realist effects. We would have a happy muddle in which critidsm would have to be most inventive just to find order. In such a case, the tropes of semiotic/psychoanalytic/feminist/essentialist discourse could complicate things nicdy, especially if we didn't pay them the wrong kinds of respect, as Kuhn and Kaplan do in these books. Theories that follow thdr own train of thought giddily down the path beforelanguage is acquired, before birth, back to the womb, beyond into nature's program, and forever out of bounds in mythic invariables or lost in the supracerebrated net of signifying are misappropriated as tools to root out contamination. They are more like fevers; one can catch them and burn brightly. They can make an artist's work seem inner lighted. But as applied language, as a method by which to judge films, they pass over the living body with hands of an undertaker. And grappling with the language of the avant-garde in these days of the postmodern leaves you squardy out of touch. The scholarship of E. Ann Kaplan's book is much to her credit and our edification, but one often wishes that she would give up her exasperation with present theory's inadequades and get on with making the kinds of criticism she continually calls for. SOHNYA SAYRES Eleanor Burke Leacock. Myths of Male Dominance. New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 1981. 344 pp. $8.50 (paper); $17.50 (doth). Powers of Desire. Eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press, 1983. 489 pp. $12.50 (paper); $25 (doth). Contemporary sodalist feminist concerns relate the two books listed above, though they are not really comparable. Leacock's effort attempts to unravel our received wisdom about the position of women in pre-capitalist and, specifically, pre-class sodety, whereas the wide-ranging collection of essays, fiction, and poetry edited by Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson begins to unravel our common formulations about the natureofsexuality itsdf. It is difficult to assess Myths ofMale Dominance fairly in juxtaposition to the seminal Powers of Desire. Leacock's is an important voice in a time when establishment anthropologists , resting on their positivist ground rules, attempt to decree what merits to be labled knowledge of the world in our work, and continue to devdop theories about universal and inevitable male dominance. Myths contains articles Leacock published over a period of 30 years, a fact which serves to remind us of her involvement with feminist issues before the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s. She was the first to apply the concept of egalitarianism to the rdations between women and men in band sodeties largdy as a result of her work among the Montagnais-Naskapi, a native foraging people of the Labrador Peninsula. Her study of thdr recent history of colonization and her reconstruction of thdr pre-colonial past, discussed in this volume, have been the center of fruitful debate in anthropology. Induded here as well is her introduction to Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, upon which Engds based his own Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the State. Leacock wrote the introduction to the 1972 edition of this latter work too, and discussions of Engels' hypothesis are threaded throughout her book. A wdcome and important section in this collection consists of rebuttals to the arguments of male 174 the minnesota review dominance found in the writings ofClaude Levi-Strauss, Steven Goldberg (The Inevitability ofPatriarchy), and the sodobiologjst, Edward O. Wilson. Myths and Powers offer an instructive contrast in their respective approaches to Marxism...

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