Teresa L. Ebert

Following the equal-rights struggles of the 1960s, feminism became involved in the theoretical problems posed by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, queer theory, postcolonialism, and Marxism. After years of debate about whether feminism can or should accommodate these other modes of contemporary thought, Ludic Feminism and After provides a way of making a leap forward. Teresa Ebert rethinks such notions as "pleasure," "essentialism," "performance," "labor," "class," "body," and "difference" through readings of influential texts by feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Rigoberta Mench, Donna Haraway, Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, and Teresa de Lauretis. She not only engages the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, but also moves beyond the academic arena to address the "backlash" phenomenon and the writings of "popular" critics like Camille Paglia. Ebert argues that the crisis of feminist theory in postmodernity is about the very meaning of politics and the possibility for effective social change. The future of feminism and feminist theory, believes Ebert, lies in reclaiming radical knowledge(s) that have been obscured by what she calls "ludic theory": the branch of postmodernism that sees politics primarily as a linguistic and textual practice, and focuses on subverting cultural representations of difference. She argues instead for the possibilities of a "resistance postmodernism" in feminism: theory grounded in the social struggle over the "material differences" of labor and access to economic means and resources. Ebert's provocative and powerful book challenges ludic feminism within the academy, and outlines transformative politics and feminist theory that can address material crises, such as the international trade in young women for prostitution, dowry murders in India, and the genocidal rape in Bosnia. The author seeks to go beyond dominant theories to open a radically new space for an active third wave feminism. Ludic Feminism and After is sure to be influential and controversial.

Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism

Ludic Feminism and After

Donald E. Morton

Masʼud Zavarzadeh

"These are not friendly times for starting a new Marxist journal, and yet these are exactly the times in which a new Marxist journal is urgently needed to provide transformative knowledges for social change. Transformation is a response to the crisis of revolutionary theory and praxis. The (post)modern "left" has abandoned the project of revolution in favor or bourgeois democracy, marginalized problems of labor, class and exploitation, and elided the centrality of "need." More to the point, "left" theory has deserted economic and labor issues at a time of increasing class differences between North and South, the poor and the rich the world over, a time when the workers of the world are increasingly subjected to exploitation by ever more innovative technologies and subtle forms of management to keep the rate of profit high for transnational cartels. In opposition to the post-al left and its ludic politics, Transformation deploys classical Marxist theory to provide boundary explanations of contemporary capitalism-without-borders. It places classical Marxist theory in new terrains and brings it to bear on understanding the emerging contradictions in post-al societies - from labor relations to sexuality; from markets to the cyberspaces of virtual reality, from health-care to "crime" and "family values," from post-al forms of racism to hyper-colonialism and "welfare." Transformation is a vanguard journal opposing both nostalgia and utopia and insisting on developing rigorous materialist boundary explanations of post-al social totality - the boundary analyses, in short, that are necessary for sustained intervention by revolutionary praxis in ending private ownership of the means of production and establishing international socialism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Marxism and Postmodernism

Post-ality

A provocative and controversial challenge to postmodern academic feminism

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh

"A gem of a book. Its topics are timely and provocative for cultural studies, sociology, English, literary theory, and education classes. The authors are brilliant thinkers and clear, penetrating writers." -Peter McLaren, UCLA, author of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire Class in Culture demonstrates the power of moving beyond cultural politics to a deeper class critique of contemporary life. Making a persuasive case for class as the material logic of culture, the book is written in a double register of short critiques of life practices-from food and education to race, stem-cell research, and abortion-as well as sustained critiques of such theoretical discourses as ideology, consumption, globalization, and 9/11. Surpassing the orthodoxies of cultural studies, Class in Culture makes surprising connections among seemingly unrelated cultural events and practices and offers a groundbreaking and complex understanding of the contemporary world.

Class in Culture

Lise Vogel

Marxist-feminist Thought Today

"A stimulating, path-breaking text that stands out as both an anti-text in the arena of cultural studies and as a classic Marxist analysis of the field of cultural critique." --Peter McLaren, author of Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution "This powerful book confirms that Teresa L. Ebert is one of the most significant Marxist theorists currently writing about the humanities." --Barbara Foley, author of Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridan dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflitive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.

The Task of Cultural Critique

A bold and compelling remapping of contemporary cultural critique

Teresa L. Ebert

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