"[This work] represents a fine American tradition of feminist polemic, robust, scrupulous, and libertarian...[It] encompasses a richly varied range of topics, from unhinged heroines in 1940s movies--Bette Davis and Joan Crawford round the bend (a perceptive and original paper from Mary Ann Doane) to Degas' studies of the nude (a sensitive affirmation by Carol M. Armstrong), from Gertrude Stein's fatness to Meret Oppenheim's pose, with oil-blackened hands, for Man Ray's 1934 photograph...No single prescription emerges, except, as Suleiman writes, a shared desire to free Woman from restrictive definition, a common `dream' that the lines of difference will be `mixed up in new, energizing ways.' "

"One of the impressive features of the collection is the range of disciplines it displays which can (now) be brought to bear on the central question: how have women's bodies been read (and why?), and what is the gap between those readings and the way women read, and write, themselves? Psychiatry, anthropology, art history, literary criticism, theology, semiotics, film studies, translation, law, and philosophy are involved in the answers to the questions."