Sex In Question: French materialist feminism

by Diana Leonard (Editor), Lisa Adkins (Editor)

Since the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," French feminist thought has informed and shaped the on-going debates in the English-speaking world. This book introduces English speakers to the work of a major group of French feminists - those de Beauvoir herself supported.

Genres: Feminism

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1995

About the author

Diana Mary Leonard was a British feminist author and professor of sociology. Active in the women's liberation movement in the United Kingdom, such as participation in the WRRC Publications Collective, she was also in close contact with French materialist feminism and translated much of Christine Delphy's work into English. Themes explored in Leonard's work include critique of marriage and heterosexuality as institutions of patriarchal oppression of women and analysis of male sexual violence and bullying faced by girls in the classroom. Leonard's work in the social sciences was complemented by a background in the natural sciences, with specialisation in archaeology and anthropology. She died at 68 of endometrial cancer.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the Foucault takedown at the end

[The Coat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous. If your interests overlap with any of the topics here - feminism, marxism, materialism, gender, sexuality, sex, the gender binary, origins of gender, capitalism - this is an extremely theoretically rich set of texts. Aimed to disabuse readers of inaccurate accounts of "French feminism" which, the editors suggest, resulted in atrophied, vulgar forms of anglophone feminism, even and especially supposedly socialist or Marxist feminisms (I'm always happy to see a crit of Fraser which is one of their main examples of this).

[Alba M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read years ago, never rated