Cover of When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics

When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics

In this collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge.Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, Trinh examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the search by Western "experts" for the hiddenvalues of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflictswith depth, while innerexperience is reduced to mere personal feeling.

Read more

When the Moon Waxes Redis an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 264 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies Shares feminism, film, nonfiction
  2. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color Shares feminism, race, nonfiction
  3. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation Shares feminism, nonfiction, race
  4. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations Shares feminism, nonfiction, race

“People who read When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art
  2. Gender Advertisements
  3. Women, Art, And Power And Other Essays
  4. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire

“If you want more of the same (social science about feminism), start with these.”

  1. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma
  2. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
  3. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
  4. Black Looks: Race and Representation

“If it was the feminism that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings
  2. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
  3. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
  4. Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
  2. Child psychology
  3. Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural
  4. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader