The Sexual Metaphor - Softcover

Weinreich-Haste, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071080282X ISBN 13: 9780710802828

Publisher: Pearson Education Limited, 1993

Synopsis

Are men and women still the same after 25 years of feminism? Change has been slow because sexual stereotypes are hard to change. Part of the difficulty, contends Helen Haste, is that we think about men and women in terms of the polarity of masculine-feminine. She argues that polarity, or duality, is a major metaphor of western thought. We map it on to gender, so that changing ideas about gender is an enormous challenge to our thinking. As long as masculinity is defined by one pole, feminity is defined by its negation. In this book, Haste shows how the assault on traditional conceptions of gender is in fact a confrontation with some of the deeply-rooted metaphors, as well as models of rationality and control, that underlie western culture.

About this title

Review

Helen Haste...has made important contributions to the study of how moral personalities are made. Her book...goes beyond her particular discipline to larger reflections on how a gendered world came to be. Gender, for Haste, is not a lens but a metaphor. Gender oppression is so pervasive, and reproduces itself so effortlessly, because it has been incorporated into our language and, in that way, into our thought...When we want to move between what we know and what we do not, we find metaphors seductively waiting to take us across the bridge into new realms of experience...To challenge the dichotomy between male and female, therefore, is to question everything; in searching for more authentic metaphors, feminists must take on reason itself. Haste calls for a 'cultural feminism' that goes well beyond the rationalistic prognosis of liberal and socialist versions, which seek only to replace one kind of order with another...Haste's utopia smashes dualities by transforming them into multiplicities. -- Alan Wolfe "New Republic"

Edition details

• Publisher: Pearson Education Limited
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 071080282X
• ISBN 13: 9780710802828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250