Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture - Hardcover

An exciting array of choices, or a litany of oppressive stereotypes? These personal ads---like so many gendered representations in the contemporary U.S.---offer us both. This volume takes up the challenge of such questions, central to understanding gender in the United States. Taken together, the articles in this collection articulate and combine two senses of 'negotiating gender.'

In this fascinating, if somewhat uneven, anthology 20 social scientists (mostly anthropologists) take turns exploring the ways gender is worked out in various settings in the United States today. The editors divide the treatments into five sections: Challenges to Gender Stereotypes; Feminism and the New Right; Gender in the Workplace; Stereotypes of Difference and Strategies of Identity; and the Marginality of Women's Roles. Contributors deal with topics as diverse as the cooption of feminist discourse by the Right to Life movement; unwed inner-city teenagers as tricksters; differing attitudes regarding home versus employment among two Hispanic-American populations; and strategies of striking union women at Yale. A few of the pieces fail to convince, due to their origins as parts of earlier works with different slants, but on the whole this collection is worthy of high recommendation for academic and women's studies collections.
-Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib . , Id.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.