Good, bad or dangerous to know: Representations of femininity in narrative accounts of PMS

Analyses of cultural representations of femininity have been central to feminist thinking for decades. Early critiques, located largely within a sociological tradition, argued that symbolic images of ‘woman’ act as a direct reflection of women’s lives (Moore, 1975; Weibel, 1977). In recent years, largely due to the influence of post-structuralist theorising, there has been a growing acknowledgement that representations do not merely reflect the lives of women, but actively subjugate female subjectivity through creating and reinforcing the notion of ‘woman’ as lack, as absence, or as other to man. As the art historian Griselda Pollock has argued, ‘representation is one of the many social processes by which specific orders of sexual difference are ceaselessly constructed, modified, resisted and reconstituted…. Representations articulate/produce meanings as well as re-presenting a world already meaningful’ (Pollock, 1988:206). This school of feminist criticism, drawing on both psychoanalytic theorising and analyses of semiotics, focuses not on reflection but on the repression of woman through representation: on the creation of conditions within which femininity is discursively constructed (Smith, 1988).