Sexing the Self

Faced with the seemingly enormous difficulty of representing `others', many theorists working in Cultural Studies have been turning to themselves as a way of speaking about the personal. In Sexing the Self Elspeth Probyn tackles this question of the sex of the self, an issue of vital importance to feminists and yet neglected by feminist theory until now, to suggest that there are ways of using our gendered selves in order to speak and theorize non-essential but embodied selves. Arguing for `feminisms with attitude', Sexing the Self ranges across a wide range of theoretical strands, drawing upon a body of literature from early Cultural Studies to Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, from `identity debates' to Foucault's `care of the self'.

Elspeth Probyn

Acknowledgements; Introduction: speaking the self and other feminist subjects; 1 A problematic: speaking the self; 2 Problematic selves: the irony of the feminine; 3 Moving selves and stationary others: ethnography's ontological dilemma; 4 Materializing locations: images and selves; 5 Technologizing the self: Foucault and 'le souci du soi'; 6 'Without her I'm nothing: feminisms with attitude; Conclusion: sexing the self; Bibliography; Index;