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Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud's idea of penis envy, Ruti's autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded—that things will eventually get better—Ruti demystifies the false hope that often causes us to tolerate an unbearable present.
Theoretically rigorous and lucidly written, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings is a trenchant critique of contemporary gender relations. Refuting the idea that we live in a postfeminist world where gender inequalities have been transcended, Ruti describes how neoliberal heteropatriarchy has transformed itself in subtle and stealthy, and therefore all the more insidious, ways. Mobilizing Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, Jacques Lacan's account of desire, and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, she analyzes the rationalization of intimacy, the persistence of gender stereotypes, and the pornification of heterosexual culture. Ruti shines a spotlight on the depression, anxiety, frustration, and disenchantment that frequently lie beneath our society's sugarcoated mythologies of self-fulfillment, romantic satisfaction, and professional success, speaking to all who are concerned about the emotional costs of the pressure-cooker ethos of our age.

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    • Library Journal

      April 1, 2018

      Ruti (critical theory, gender & sexuality studies, Univ. of Toronto; The Ethics of Opting Out) makes a compelling case for understanding the Freudian attribution of the female as a state of lack in metaphoric rather than physical terms. The envy, that is, arises from most cultures ascribing power to the (straight, and typically white) male of the human species in opposition to other humans who lack--and envy--this status. By referencing her own childhood in Finland, where gender parity is close to normative, Ruti offers lived experiences as well as cogent readings of Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, to make her case for how feelings of inadequacy are culturally reproduced, rather than biologically determined. Her writing unfolds in increasingly theoretical passages, bringing readers almost effortlessly from the concrete to the abstract. As with her course on heteropatriarchy's damages to the emotional well-being of those who are seen as lacking the effective penis, Ruti's book invites discussion among men and women, the repressed and the celebrated, as a way of correcting fetishistic acceptance of phallic primacy. VERDICT For all academic and large public libraries. Philosophers, gender scholars, and well-read and curious feminists, as well as queer studies students, will find much here to consider and discuss.--Francisca Goldsmith, Lib. Ronin, Worcester, MA

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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  • English

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