Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies

What happens when feminists speak their sexed selves? How can the self be represented in cultural studies? Faced with the seemingly enormous difficulty of representing "others," many theorists working in cultural studies have been turning to themselves as a way of speaking about the personal. InSexing the Self, Elspeth Probyn retraces this evacuation of "experience" as a critical term in cultural studies, and argues for a move beyond a crisis mode of representation, where no one can speak for another. She tackles the question of the sex of the self, an issue of vital importance to feminists, yet one which has been neglected by feminist theory, and suggests that there are ways of using our gendered selves in order to speak and theorize non-essential but embodied selves. Arguing for "feminisms with attitude," Probyn ranges across a wide variety of theoretical strands, drawing upon a body of literature from early cultural studies to feminist literary criticism, from theemergence of "the feminine" as a privileged term in cultural theory to the rampant self-reflexivity of postmodern ethnography, from "identity debates to Foucault's "care of the self."Sexing the Selfpresents both the difficulties and the necessity for alternative articulations of genders, bodies, experiences, selves, and theories.