Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and Performance (Women's Studies/Cultural Studies) - Softcover

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809322870 ISBN 13: 9780809322879

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance is an interdisciplinary study of etiquette texts, conduct literature, and advice books and films. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster analyzes the work of such women authors as Emily Post, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Webster Foster, Emily Brontė, Frances E. W. Harper, and Martha Stewart as well as such women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Kasi Lemmons.

            

“Specifically,” Foster notes, “I was interested in the possibility of locating power and agency in the voices of popular etiquette writers.” Her investigation led her to analyze etiquette and conduct literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Within this wide scope, she redefines the boundaries of conduct literature through a theoretical examination of the gendered body as it is positioned in conduct books, etiquette texts, poetry, fiction, and film.

 

Drawing on Bakhtin, Gates, Foucault, and the new school of performative feminism to develop an interdisciplinary approach to conduct literature—and literature as conduct—Foster brings a unique perspective to the analysis of ways in which the body has been gendered, raced, and constructed in terms of class and sexuality.

            

Even though women writers have been actively writing conduct and etiquette texts since the medieval period, few critical examinations of such literature exist in the fields of cultural studies and literary criticism. Thus, Foster’s study fills a gap and does so uniquely in the existing literature. In examining these voices of authority over the body, Foster identifies the dialogic in the texts of this discipline that both supports and disrupts the hegemonic discourse of a gendered social order.

About this title

About the Author

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English, Film Studies and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her many books include Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary and Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: DeColonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity.

Foster's most recent book is entitled Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film, published by Palgrave/Macmillan.

Visit gwendolynaudreyfoster.com for more information on Gwendolyn Audrey Foster's publications.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809322870
• ISBN 13: 9780809322879
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168