Rhetoric of Femininity

Conducting and analyzing rich interviews from three generations of a hundred adult women of diverse social identities provides Pompper with an informed foundation from which to explore femininities and how they have shaped the lived experiences of girls and women throughout history and today. Coupling the voices of these women with prominent feminist theoretical frameworks illustrate the many paradoxes and metaphorical ‘corsets’ of femininity that constrain women’s ability to be authentic in work, sports, sexuality, and politics and negatively impact their health and well-being. This text will be of high interest to scholars and students within the many fields that aim to eradicate social prescriptions that limit girls and women. -- Tracy Tylka, The Ohio State University at Marion
In her highly illuminating Rhetoric of Femininity: Female Body Image, Media, and Gender Role Stress/Conflict, Donnalyn Pompper deploys a creative methodology of selecting 45 representative images from five of the ‘seven sisters’ US women’s magazines, to engage a wide range of women on discussions about ‘femininity.’ This group of multi-generational, ethnically, class, ability, and religiously diverse women reveals widespread discrepancy between mediated images and women’s experiences, ability, and satisfaction with their bodies in relation to those images. -- Angharad N. Valdivia, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Not only is femininity hard to define, but for women of all ages it is difficult to know how to be feminine in a world saturated with conflicting, impossible to achieve media-constructed images. This book offers a much needed interdisciplinary investigation of femininity coupled with a critical component - the voices of multigenerational women. It is a must read for scholars and women of all ages. -- Tia C. M. Tyree, Howard University