Decolonising Gender

This innovative study challenges a possessive or colonising approach to questions of gender. Through an illuminating selection of cross-cultural readings from African and queer writing to a shamanistic Shakespeare, Decolonising Gender offers: a way out of some of the current deadlocks of feminist theory; an anti-essentialist approach to gender in which both male and female readers may address a consciousness of the feminine; a platform for postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers to engage in a dialogue around the status of the performative in regard to the other; a new theory of poetic realism in both canonical and postcolonial literatures; a re-reading of the Enlightenment legacy in terms of postcolonial liberation theory; a comparison of contemporary debates on the real across disciplines. Negotiating a path between feminist theory's common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism, Caroline Rooney argues convincingly that by rethinking our understanding of gender we might also equip ourselves to resist racism and totalitarianism more effectively.Rooney, Caroline is the author of 'Decolonising Gender' with ISBN 9780415424189 and ISBN 0415424186.