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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Berlant, Lauren

Hardcover

Women's Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0822341840
ISBN13: 9780822341840
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Mar 17 2008
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant's groundbreaking national sentimentality project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural intimate public in the United States, a women's culture distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, women's books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman's life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as chick lit, circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension.

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