A literary critical and historical chronicle of womens culture in the United States from 1830 to the present, by a leading Americanist.
"Guiding us through a 'women's culture' animated by scenes of longing for a fantasmatic commonality, an ever-elusive normativity, Lauren Berlant illuminates, in readings unfailingly subtle and wise, the psychic negotiations and emotional bargaining that women in U.S. culture conduct to be part of an 'intimate public.' More dazzlingly still, she addresses what the business of sentimentality works to obscure: the possibility of political agency in the face of a cultural machinery that makes us feel helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. To read "The Female Complaint "is to realize how long and how much it's been needed."--Lee Edelman, author of "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive"
