Blurb:

This essay was written as an introduction to a collection of essays entitled Gendering the Reader, whose aim was to question the simple assumption that women read as or like women. As a group of feminists, we were concerned to produce essays which engaged in some of the debates about reading as a gendered activity, but we wanted to trouble some of the simple dichotomies which assumed that women all read in one particular way. We wished to show the complexity of women’s reception and interpretation of texts and we also wanted to show that analysing the process of reading, and commenting on it in relation to gender, was a complex procedure.