This binary opposition between a nature we are born with and the nurture we acquire continues to be reinvented, thus lending support to George Santayana’s observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It surfaced again in 1949 when Simone de Beauvoir declared in The Second Sex that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’: mulier fit, as it were, non nascitur. And it was to achieve common currency in the 1960s via the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose key terms are ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The hidden politics of that opposition were teased out by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, which demonstrates that what we unthinkingly perceive as ‘natural’ behaviour is frequently ‘culture’ in disguise. The critic’s business is therefore to identify and explain those ideological processes that enable cultural constructs such as gender to masquerade as natural essences.

‘Gender’ is the name given to that cultural construction of biological difference that deems it equally as unnatural for females to behave in ways coded ‘masculine’ as for males to display behaviour coded ‘feminine’. Gender has been the site of investigations into sexual politics since the 1960s. Inhabiting a body classified biologically as female, a woman may well believe that she is not only female but also feminine by nature, ignorant of the fact that as a social being she has been acculturated into what her society considers appropriately ‘feminine’ behaviour. More alarmingly, she may have internalised this process so completely that she experiences its products as her own ‘natural’ self. But once it dawns on her that to ‘become’ a woman in a world run by men is to enter it as a second-class citizen, she will want to take apart those acculturation processes that have put her together, and ask whose interests they serve. At that moment, in addition to being ‘female’ in sex and ‘feminine’ in gender, she becomes feminist in politics.

This is the territory Anne Cranny­Francis enters in Engendered Fictions, a book designed to make accessible to inexperienced readers a sophisticated account of the ubiquity of gender politics in cultural practices. We learn from it how to locate and analyse the hidden gender assumptions in various types of verbal and visual text encountered in our everyday lives. We learn also that in order to think clearly about such matters and write about them with precision we need to acquire a technical vocabulary which ignoramuses deride as jargon. Because the phenomena to be analysed are never simply given to us unproblematically by nature, but are always mediated by culture, they are not unchangeable ‘essences’ but historically variable ‘constructs’, whose constructedness may well be obscured by the very words most commonly used to describe them. Take the term ‘self’, for instance, which evokes the idea of something uniquely our own, given to us at birth, and already intact before we encounter language and the ideologies it encodes.

Defined like that, the word ‘self’ becomes part of the problem. This is why, together with ‘individuality’ (from individualis, ‘undivided’) it tends to be replaced in gender-sensitive analyses by ‘subject’, a word which conveys much more clearly the political sense of something ‘subject to’ (sub-jectus, ‘thrown under’) powerful ideologies outside itself. Consequently, it is more helpful to speak of ‘the construction of the subject’ than ‘the creation of the self’, if only because the ‘deconstruction’ of something constructed in culture is easier to imagine than the uncreation of something created in nature.

The dominant ideology Cranny-Francis sets out to expose is a pro-male bias which manifests itself in psychoanalytic terms as ‘phallocentrism’, and which produces that male-dominant social system known as ‘patriarchy’. A patriarchal society sustains itself by ensuring that power remains in male hands, phallocratically; and although it disapproves of homosexuality, it nevertheless values male homosocial bonding more highly than heterosexual relationships. Patriarchal societies not only oppress women by disempowering and humiliating them with sexist practices, but also cripple men by making them afraid of displaying ‘feminine’ characteristics. Patriarchy prohibits those non-exploitative gender relations that this book advocates.

Cranny-Francis studies ‘representations’ of gender relations in a variety of discourses, which collectively perpetuate damaging ‘fictions’ of how men and women relate to one another. Benefiting from the broadening of English Studies into Cultural Studies, she takes her examples eclectically from writers both canonical (D. H. Lawrence) and non-canonical (Fay Weldon) as well as from popular culture: the story of Red Riding Hood or a rock video by Madonna serves her purpose equally well as advertisements, the TV series Cagney and Lacey or the Batman movie. Whether written or oral, verbal or visual, all are treated as ‘texts’ in which oppressive ideologies of gender are ‘inscribed’ in ways this book teaches us how to ‘read’.

Cranny-Francis’s approach to such cultural products is consistently materialist: she sees them as being ‘produced’ at particular moments in history, ‘circulating’ in varying conditions, and being ‘consumed’ by different readerships. Each text tries to situate us in the ‘subject-position’ most favourable to its own ideological agenda. Offered the subject-position of ‘acquiescent’ reader, we need to learn how to manoeuvre ourselves into the subject-position of ‘resistant’ reader, so that we can read each text ‘against the grain’ of its ideology. To ‘deconstruct’ reactionary cultural constructs is thus to intervene productively in a process that otherwise makes us complicit in their circulation. Deconstruction opens up the possibility of transforming human subjectivities by reconstructing the ideologies that fashion them.

Now and again Cranny-Francis reminds us that the representations she analyses are not simply gendered by a sexist ideology, but fashioned also by equally oppressive ideologies of race and class. Technically outside her brief, these are investigated by other people in other primers. Nevertheless, attentive readers of Engendering Fictions will perceive how the methodology developed and exemplified there might be used to expose those class biases and racist prejudices embedded in cultural representations that beguilingly contrive to do our thinking for us and tell us what we feel.

If you are already familiar with such matters, Engendering Fictions may strike you as a well-intentioned but pedestrian book which labours the obvious. And if your affinities lie with French feminisms, you may object that too much space is allotted to social semiotics and not enough to psychoanalysis. But if the cultural consequences of gender politics intrigue you, and you feel in need of guidance from an intelligent expositor who won’t treat you like a moron because you don’t already know what you’re hoping to learn, then this non-threatening and highly informative book can be strongly recommended.