| Our choice of misogyny (along with misandry and misanthropy) as the organizing topic for this collection, which originally appeared as a special issue of Representations, calls for some explanation. Certainly we did not imagine that the essays collected herein would discover misogyny. The past twenty-five years of feminist research and criticism have already provided ample evidence of the existenceand persistenceof misogyny and attempts to escape from it. Assuming, then, its existence, we were attracted to misogyny as a question that makes visible certain perhaps intractable antagonisms between texts and their readers, as well as between texts and the persons who become the objects of their representations. That is, misogyny seemed to us to emblematize the problem that representation poses when it creates oppositions between what we perceive and what we endorse. And in that sense, misogyny provides the occasion for a discussion of the limits of idealism, or of a conflict between authors and readers comparable to the conflict between misogynists and the women who are misrepresented by its pervasive, but often unrecognized, images. |
| Some recent feminist writing has imagined that this disjunction could be healed by a science fiction, a utopian vision that would realign our desires with our views about the world; but, while accepting the spirit of that vision, the essays in this volume largely concern themselves with the difficulties of enacting an easy fit between representation and what one might think of as a political will. More precisely, they explore the relation between gender, eroticism, and violence through close analysis of the never simplein fact, always complicatedmodes by which sexual and social difference are mediated by symbolic practice. Within a perspective that embraces so-called high and popular culture, the essays treat a wide variety of genres and forms, ranging from theological tracts and polemical satires, to lyric and epic poetry, to novels, novellas, popular pamphlets, magazines, aesthetic treatises, and advice manuals. On the visual arts, material extends from seventeenth-century painting, to a series of turn-of-the-century monotypes, to the contemporary slasher film. The intent is not, however, to arrive at anything like a general theory based on the accumulation of examples. For, despite the numerous and important points of convergence between essays covering such widely divergent types, each essay is rooted in a specific historical context. Their unity lies less in a common approach or method than in a historically rooted relation between particularity of context and the persistence of certain strikingly |
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