Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (RLE Feminist Theory)

<p><em>Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse</em> confronts the impasses in materialist feminist work on rethinking ‘woman’ as a discursively constructed subject. The book looks at the problem of examining critically the social dimensions on which theories of discourse are premised: how such theories understand ‘materiality’; the relation between ‘women’s experience’ and feminist politics and that between history and discourse. Rosemary Hennessy considers the work of Kristeva Foucault Laclau and Mouffe and argues for a materialist feminist re-articulation of discourse as ideology. Concerns over identity and difference are incorporated into a rewriting of materialist feminism's analysis of women's oppression across capitalist and patriarchal structures. In adapting postmodernist theories in this way Hennessy develops a project of social change where feminism while maintaining its specificity is necessarily aligned with other emancipatory movements.</p>