The sexual metaphor
We are sexual animals, and the metaphors of sexuality are especially deep-rooted. To quote Helen Haste's prologue: 'It is extremely convenient to make assumptions on the basis of whether a person is male or female...By mapping masculine and feminine on to so many other dimensions to which we also ascribe polarity, we deepen the problem...Examples [of such polarities] are light-dark, public-private, arts-science, rational-intuitive (and rationality-chaos), sun-moon, active-passive, hard-soft, thinking-feeling'...The Sexual Metaphor is a thoughtful and original examination of the effect that the common but tacit perception of these sexual slogans has had, and more crucially is having, on a society that is struggling to separate issues of sex and gender...[It] is a thought-provoking and brilliantly targeted book.--Ian Stewart (Nature )Through her work as a feminist researcher, Helen Haste has become convinced that the pursuit of rational justice is inadequate as a model of social change…By the end of the book the reader is introduced to cultural metaphors of gender as they apply to a wide range of interdisciplinary topics including sociobiology, sexuality, science, feminism, the backlash against feminism, moral reasoning and the men's movement. Changing the existing gender metaphors requires the creation of an alternative perspective that escapes the dualistic destiny of being just an antithesis to the dominant view.--Meredith M. Kimball (Theory and Psychology )Helen Haste...has made important contributions to the study of how moral personalities are made. Her book...goes beyond her particular discipline to larger reflections on how a gendered world came to be. Gender, for Haste, is not a lens but a metaphor. Gender oppression is so pervasive, and reproduces itself so effortlessly, because it has been incorporated into our language and, in that way, into our thought...When we want to move between what we know and what we do not, we find metaphors seductively waiting to take us across the bridge into new realms of experience...To challenge the dichotomy between male and female, therefore, is to question everything; in searching for more authentic metaphors, feminists must take on reason itself. Haste calls for a 'cultural feminism' that goes well beyond the rationalistic prognosis of liberal and socialist versions, which seek only to replace one kind of order with another...Haste's utopia smashes dualities by transforming them into multiplicities.--Alan Wolfe (New Republic )
Helen Haste24 cmIncludes bibliographical references and indexes
