Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling

Texts, Facts and Femininity is a collection of essays which illustrates the full range of work from Dorothy E. Smith, one of the leading feminist thinkers in North America today. This volume consists of key published and unpublished essays which illustrate the full range of her works in which she discusses texts as models of social relations.

Included here is Smith's famous essay, K is mentally ill, which explores the concept of mental illness through the act of reading and writing a factual account of someone becoming mentally ill. Also included are essays on femininity as discourse; the social relations of description in the context of a sociological study of the news; the micro-politics of a meeting; the "structuring" of power through texts that provide different versions of a confrontation between police and street people. The book concludes with a discussion of the distinctive properties of social organization and the relations mediated by texts.