Sororophobia Differences among Women in Literature and Culture [Hardcover]

This book looks at how differences among women have been textually represented at a variety of historical moments and in a variety of cultural contexts, including Victorian mainstream fiction, African-American mulatto novels, late twentieth-century lesbian communities, and contemporary country music.Sororophobiadesignates the complex and shifting relations between women's attempts to identify with other women and their often simultaneous desire to establish and retain difference. Michie argues for the centrality to feminism of a paradigm that moves beyond celebrations of identity and sisterhood to a more nuanced notion of women's relations with other women which may include such uncomfortable concepts as envy, jealousy, and competition as well as more institutionalized ideas of difference such as race and class. Chapters on literature are interspersed by inter-chapters on the choreography of sameness and difference among women in popular culture.

In a time when culture depicts women either at each other's throats or joined in cheery, uncomplicated sisterhood, Michie's subtle and original probing of women's relations with each other is especially welcome. --Virginia Quarterly Review

Twenty years ago 'sisterhood' was synonymous with feminism. Shortly thereafter the term dropped out of usage, as feminists began to take stock of the contradictions behind the ideality. Helena Michie is the first feminist theorist to fix her attention on the shadows lurking behind the sunny assertion of sisterhood. Strong, subtle, original, and careful,Sororophobiatakes a shockingly honest look at relations between women as they appear in theory and culture. What she finds will affect feminist theory for years to come. --Jane Gallop,University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Offers an important revisionist account of the role and value of sisterhood as an organizing rubric for feminist theory and politics....[Michie's] work haslƒ'