Feminism and the Politics of Reading

This work theorizes the processes and practices of reading within a gendered context. Looking at what it is to be a self-conscious "feminist reader" and at what happens when feminism is "off-duty", the author explores the personal and political implications of what one does each time one reads. Presenting a range of literary and visual texts and including a cross-national case study of five groups of feminist readers, this book moves from questioning the power of feminist readers of male-authored texts, and examining how women are defined by contemporary feminist writers, towards an understanding of the fully interdependent relationship between reader and text. It puts forth a theory of reading which resists ideal scenarios in favour of the chaos, confusion, pleasure and anxiety of what it means to "read as a feminist".