Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What does ‘feminist’ mean? Feminist is formed with the word ‘femme,’ ‘woman,’ and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class.
Monique WittigWoman herself is never at issue in these statements: the feminine is defined as the necessary complement to the operation of male sexuality, and, more often, as a negative image that provides male sexuality with an unfailingly phallic self-representation.
Luce IrigarayThis book takes as its point of departure the striking absence of girlhood in recent studies of early modern literature and drama, an absence that is particularly noteworthy in view of the considerable attention this scholarship has paid to boys. Although female children occupied a crucial and contested position in the early modern sex-gender system, our critical frameworks have not known how to account for them. We have been reading past their distinct positions as ‘girls’, ‘maids’, ‘damsels’ and ‘wenches’ by subsuming all female characters into the category of ‘women’. The result has been that feminist literary criticism has been without a critical vocabulary to counteract what Luce Irigaray calls ‘sexual (in)difference’, whereby female identities exist only as mirrors for men. Discourses of girlhood, I argue, fragmented gender categories in early modern England, producing multiple categories of femininity and femaleness; if the category of ‘women’ in early modern England was at times figured as merely a reflection of ‘men’, it was at best a fractured mirror.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Girlhood of Shakespeare's SistersGender, Transgression, Adolescence, pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013