Every inch a women; phallic possession, femininity, and the text.

9780774812092

Every inch a women; phallic possession, femininity, and the text.

Brooks, Carellin.

U. of British Columbia Press

2006

204 pages

$85.00

Hardcover

Sexuality studies series

PN56

Despite Freud's assertion to the contrary, sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar. Brooks examines the allure of the phallic woman, a textual figure that seems to be multiplying at an exponential rate in popular culture and even scholarly literature since the late nineteenth to the present century. Taking the beginning and end of the 20th century as points in time, she describes how the body, especially the sexual body and the marginalized body, has become an object of intense scrutiny which has become increasingly accessible, the influence of Freud in his characteristic of the phallic mother, and the increasing masculinization of women from the time of Rosie the Riveter onward. Along the way she covers the genre of the case study, the first-person narrative ("I") as a phallic and unitary privilege, the butch figure, the impact of the imagination, and the phallus as a virtual element of the body or an organ of choice. Distributed by the U. of Washington Press.

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