Gender Book

Annoying: conventionally unconventional. I've been looking for a good introduction; this is not that.

(Is it a coincidence that the best popularisers - Paglia, Greer, Moran - are all highly problematic?)

Chanter manages to make exciting parts of feminism - e.g. Calhoun's post-deconstruction stuff - sound dull, dense and theoretically empty, as if it were the same kind of navel-gazing theorism as the hyperinflated Althusserian-Foucauldian stuff. (To be fair, any overview has to cover French theory, because that's what our counter-gender people have actually been up to for decades. But not blind acceptance.)

You get the impression, here, that progress in feminist thought consists in calling your predecessors bigoted - JS Mill calls out the Victorians, Okin calls out JS Mill, Butler calls out Okin, Wittig calls out Butler, and then Calhoun calls Wittig heteronormative.