Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression
ISBN: 9780429238321
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Area Studies; Gender Studies;

In seven lucid, incisive essays written over a 15-year period, Bartky confronts some of the ways in which women can be disempowered by the society they nonetheless support. With uncompromising logic, she shows how feminism can be integrated into philosophy. ``On Psychological Oppression'' explores the reality of such oppression and the resulting alienation of the oppressed, and the similarities between the effects of sexism and those of racism and colonialism. ``Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds'' maintains that traditional heterosexual relationships keep women subservient through unequal exchange of women's emotional support for men's economic support. Women's acquiescence to their own sexual objectification and the inevitable failure of their efforts to match mass-marketed standards of beauty is discussed in terms of Marx's concept of alienation in ``Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation.'' Other pieces consider the complexities of ``politically correct sexuality'' and how Michel Foucault's perspectives can be brought into feminist dialogue. Bartky teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Sandra Lee Bartky was born Sandra Lee Schwartz in Chicago, Illinois on May 5, 1935. She received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She taught philosophy and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was hired as an instructor in 1963, was appointed a full professor in 1990, and retired as professor emerita in 2003. She founded the gender and women's studies program there.

She was a feminist philosopher who argued that women were subconsciously submitting to men by accepting an unnatural cultural standard for the ideal female body. She wrote several books including Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness, Femininity and Domination, and Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays. She died from complications of intestinal surgery on October 18, 2016 at the age of 81.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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