Covers from the post-WWI period up to the present Pulls together many strands of women's activism Written for students, provides them with a concise and accessible overiew Author uses her expertise in the field to produce an insightful synethesis

The contributors to Re-Understanding Media advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan's key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that "the medium is the message" for feminist ends. They argue that while McLuhan's theory provides a falsely universalizing conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This volume showcases essays, experimental writings, and interviews from media studies scholars, artists, activists, and those who work with and create technology. Among other topics, the contributors extend McLuhan's discussion of transportation technology to the attics and cargo boxes that moved Black women through the Underground Railroad, apply McLuhan's concept of media as extensions of humans to analyze Tupperware as media of containment, and take up 3D printing as a feminist and decolonial practice. The volume demonstrates how power dynamics are built into technological media and how media can be harnessed for radical purposes. Contributors. Nasma Ahmed, Morehshin Allahyari, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brooke Erin Duffy, Ganaele Langlois, Sara Martel, Shannon Mattern, Cait McKinney, Jeremy Packer, Craig Robertson, Sarah Sharma, Ladan Siad, Rianka Singh, Nicholas Taylor, Armond R. Towns, and Jennifer Wemigwans

Managing the Monstrous Feminine takes a unique approach to the study of the material and discursive practices associated with the construction and regulation of the female body. Jane Ussher examines the ways in which medicine, science, the law and popular culture combine to produce fictions about femininity, positioning the reproductive body as the source of women's power, danger and weakness. Including sections on 'regulation', 'the subjectification of women' and 'women's negotiation and resistance', this book describes the construction of the 'monstrous feminine' in mythology, art, literature and film, revealing its implications for the regulation and experience of the fecund female body. Critical reviews are combined with case studies and extensive interview material to illuminate discussions of subjects including: the regulation of women through the body regimes of knowledge associated with reproduction intersubjectivity and the body women's narratives of resistance. These insights into the relation between the construction of the female body and women's subjectivity will be of interest to those studying health psychology, social psychology, medical sociology, gender studies and cultural studies. The book will also appeal to all those looking for a high-level introduction to contemporary feminist thought on the female body.

Since the MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017, the movement has burgeoned across social media, moving beyond Twitter and into living rooms and courtrooms. It has spread unevenly across the globe, with some countries and societies more impacted than others, and interacted with existing feminist movements, struggles, and resistances. This interdisciplinary handbook identifies thematic and theoretical areas that require attention and interrogation, inviting the reader to make connections between the ways in which the #MeToo movement has panned out in different parts of the world, seeing it in the context of the many feminist and gendered struggles already in place, as well as the solidarities with similar movements across countries and cultures. With contributions from gender experts spanning a wide range of disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, literature, and philosophy, this groundbreaking book will have contemporary relevance for scholars, feminists, gender researchers, and policy-makers across the globe.

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies.

* Alice Munro is the master of contemporary short stories * Contemporary Western morality examined in Alice Munro's Nobel Prize-winning stories * Studies Canadian literature from the perspective of a Chinese scholar

With original and engaging contributions, this Handbook confirms feminist scholarship in development studies as a vibrant research field. It reveals the diverse ways that feminist theory and practice inform and shape gender analysis and development policies, bridging generations of feminists from different institutions, disciplines and regions.

Informed in 1944 that she was "not of the sex" entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School, African American activist Pauli Murray confronted the injustice she called "Jane Crow." In the 1960s and 1970s, the analogies between sex and race discrimination pioneered by Murray became potent weapons in the battle for women's rights, as feminists borrowed rhetoric and legal arguments from the civil rights movement. Serena Mayeri's Reasoning from Race is the first book to explore the development and consequences of this key feminist strategy. Mayeri uncovers the history of an often misunderstood connection at the heart of American antidiscrimination law. Her study details how a tumultuous political and legal climate transformed the links between race and sex equality, civil rights and feminism. Battles over employment discrimination, school segregation, reproductive freedom, affirmative action, and constitutional change reveal the promise and peril of reasoning from race-and offer a vivid picture of Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others who defined feminists' agenda. Looking beneath the surface of Supreme Court opinions to the deliberations of feminist advocates, their opponents, and the legal decision makers who heard-or chose not to hear-their claims, Reasoning from Race showcases previously hidden struggles that continue to shape the scope and meaning of equality under the law.

Drawing on border thinking, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, and queer theory, Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands brings an intersectional feminist and queer lens to understandings of borderlands, liminality, and lives lived at the margins of socio-cultural and sexual normativities. Bringing together new and contemporary interdisciplinary research from across diverse global contexts, this collection explores the lived experiences of what Gloria Anzaldua might have called 'threshold people', people who live among and in-between different worlds. While it is often challenging, difficult, and even dangerous, inhabiting marginal spaces, living at the borders of socio-cultural, religious, sexual, ethnic, or gendered norms can create possibilities for developing unique ways of seeing and understanding the worlds within which we live. This collection casts a spotlight on the margins, those 'queer spaces' in literary, cinematic, and cultural borderlands; postcolonial and transnational feminist perspectives on movement and migration; and critical analyses of liminal lives within and between socio-cultural borders. Each chapter within this unique book brings a critical insight into diverse global human experiences in the 21st Century.

This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh women who are either virtually erased from narratives, bodily eliminated through honor killings, or constructed and represented as invisible. It looks at the role of violence during critical junctures in Sikh history, including the Mughal rule, the British colonial period, the Partition of India, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, and the terror of 9/11 in the United States. The author analyzes how violence reconstitutes gender roles and sexuality within various cultural and national spaces in India and the diaspora. She also highlights questions related to women's agency and their negotiation of traumatic memories for empowering identities. The book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of postcolonial English literature, contemporary Indian literature, Sikh studies, diaspora studies, global studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, history, sociology, media and films studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies.

This book tells the story of a group of women affiliated with the United States Communist Party (CPUSA) who used a variety of rhetorical resources to build credibility and transform the party into a vibrant dwelling place for feminist discourse and activism during a conservative period. It evidences Communist women's significant and creative resistance to Cold War society and its visions of appropriate, "normal" womanhood alongside their pleas for class and race consciousness in a country that took for granted the white, middle-class aspirations of citizens. Drawing on Marxist theory, transnational coalitions, and Cold War culture, Communist women's rhetorical strategies were incredibly powerful, and this book provides insight into how they catalyzed changes in a rigid political movement by establishing a platform for their radical ideals.

Women's poetry has too often been undervalued, misread, or simply ignored; but in this updated edition, Montefiore convincingly reappraises the range, scope, and variety of women s poetry, past and present. With a readable and lucid explanation and application of current critical theory, this book helps readers to appreciate writers ranging from Christina Rossetti, Eavan Boland, and Grace Nichols to Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz, and Liz Lochhead.

This book reveals how categories of gender, class, culture and religion are modes of power which inform hierarchies of social locations and people's sense of belonging within these spaces and temporalities. It offers an alternative and innovative theoretical framework - new womanhood - for studying middle-class, urban, educated, professional women in South Asia. The book places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood in Bangladesh: a complex and heterogeneous construction of womanhood in relation to women's negotiations with public and private sphere roles and cultural norms of female propriety. It establishes new women as part of the neoliberal middle class as they construct their class identity as a status group, claiming inter-class and intra-class distinction from other women. It also explains how new womanhood is legitimized by alternative and multiple practices of respectability, varying according to women's age, stage of life, profession, household setting and experience of living in Western countries. Finally, as new women forge alternative forms of respectability, theirs is not a straightforward abandonment of old structures of respectability; rather they substitute, conceal or legitimize particular practices of respectability in particular fields. While these new women's gains are vested in the self, rather than a wider feminist politics, they have the potential to positively influence the terrain of possibilities for other women. Finally, through a study of cosmopolitan third world women who are part of a new and potentially powerful social group who occupy a privileged position in the society they live in, the book critiques Western feminist writing and challenges binary social construction of the 'Muslim woman' either as victims of patriarchal culture and religion or as a danger to Western liberalism, developing an understanding of cosmopolitan Muslim women's classed gender identity as a struggle against classifications in the neoliberal times. It is the first book-length project of its kind to provide an understanding of the concept of new women in the Global South, which will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, gender studies, feminist theory, postcolonialism, inequality studies, cultural theory, development studies and South Asian Studies.

This book examines whether we are witnessing the resilience, persistence and adaptation of masculinist discourses and practices at both domestic and international levels in the contemporary global context. Beginning with an innovative conceptualisation of masculinism, the book draws on interdisciplinary work to analyse its contours and practices across four case studies. From the anti-feminist backlash that can be found in various men's rights movements, and responses to gender-based and sexual violence, to the masculinist underpinnings of human rights discourse, and modes of intervention to protect, including drone warfare. This interdisciplinary work will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, security and international relations, and sociology.

The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984). These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments within the political and politicized women's movement in Europe and America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of 'heterotopias' in relation to specific sites/ politics/ collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the local and specific political situation in which these initiatives emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically different premises about feminism, politics and art. Contributors: Fabienne Dumont, Annika OEhrner, Katy Deepwell, Elke Krasny, Nina Hoechtl, Julia Wieger, Monika Kaiser, Kathleen Wentrack, Katia Almerini, Marcia Oliveira, Agata Jakubowska, and Susanne Altmann.

Winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, this moving manifesto "empowers women to access a fearlessness that will enable community progress" (Essence). Through one incredible woman's journey from a small Zimbabwe village to becoming one of the world's most recognizable voices in women's empowerment and education, this book "can help any woman achieve her full potential" (Kirkus Reviews). Before Tererai Trent landed on Oprah's stage as her "favorite guest of all time," she was a woman with a forgotten dream. As a young girl in a cattle-herding village in Zimbabwe, she dreamed of receiving an education but instead was married young and by eighteen, without a high school graduation, she was already a mother of three. Tererai encountered a visiting American woman who assured her that anything was possible, reawakening her sacred dream. Tererai planted her dreams deep in the earth and prayed they would grow. They did, and now not only has she earned her PhD but she has also built schools for girls in Zimbabwe, with funding from Oprah. The Awakened Woman: A Guide for Remembering & Igniting Your Sacred Dreams is her accessible, intimate, and evocative guide that teaches nine essential lessons to encourage all women to reexamine their dreams and uncover the power hidden within them-power that can recreate our world for the better. Tererai points out that there is a massive, untapped, global resource in women who have, for one reason or another, set aside their wisdom, their skills, and their dreams in order to take care of the personal business of their lives. Not only is this a type of invisible suffering experienced by countless women, this rich resource is a secret weapon for improving our world. Women have the capacity to inspire, to create, to transform-and Tererai's call to action "shines as a beacon of hope to women everywhere" (Danica McKellar, actress and New York Times bestselling author).

'A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money' - Harry Cleaver What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future. Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defence of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges. Beyond Money shows that, by organising around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.

This book synthesizes the modern literature and provides a springboard for future advances in the field of feminist cirminology This book will be ideal as a supplement for a variety of courses in criminology, sociology, and women's studies

Drawing on empirical data from women who pay for sexual services and those who provide services to women, this ground-breaking study is the first of its kind in the UK, detailing the experiences of women who pay for sex in an explicit, direct, prearranged way. Unlike previous research on clients, which has predominantly focused on men who buy sex or women who engage in romance tourism in places such as the Caribbean, this innovative research offers new and original insights into the demand side of commercial sex. Too often, it is assumed that only men pay for sex from women or other men. Women are assumed to be service providers and are unimaginable as clients. This book therefore offers a radical departure from existing scholarship on commercial sex. In addition, the book examines the experiences of couples who pay for commercial sex, a client group that has received scant investigation. The book explores women's reasons for their engagement in commercial sex services, their backgrounds and characteristics, their strategies for remaining safe and managing potential risks, as well as their sexual health strategies. The nature of sexual service bookings with women clients is also examined, exploring the types of services women seek, the places where bookings occur and the fess they pay. Finally, the experiences of men, women and trans sex workers who provide sexual services to women are examined. By drawing on our unique data and comparing it to the literature on men clients, we present our theory 'Converging Sexualities'. We argue that commercial sex is a site of behavioural convergence and that women clients are behaving in ways that could be described as masculine or feminine. Our study therefore offers new ways to understand sexuality. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of sexuality, sex work and women's behaviour.

This volume explores the processes of investigating cultures of equality and sets out an epistemological framework for generating a more just and response-able knowledge. It offers a tapestry of inventive, self-reflexive, collective, and situated praxis of conducting politically informed research. Such efforts contest-or occasionally reinvent-the social and cultural worlds that we currently inhabit, in an attempt at building cultures of equality across different locations and contexts. The book engages with the idea of producing knowledge with others, indicating the political potential of scientific practice and offering a view of knowledge as a collective affective-intellectual effort. It provides an inventory of creative engagements with concepts and methodologies enabling production of socially responsible knowledges. By critically exploring new possibilities of scientific inquiry, the contributors reflect on how knowledge can be generated to serve the political agenda of movements for equality and social justice. The chapters also elucidate different conceptualisations of and approaches to who the researcher is and how they interact with cultural and social worlds.

In this book, international psychoanalytic writers address the question 'What do Women Want Today?' from a variety of lenses, bringing into focus the creative, resilient forces shown by women in their multiple social and psychological tasks. The book reviews classic psychoanalytic theories about the feminine within a new cultural context. It challenges hegemonic gender prejudices and discusses new conceptions that do not pathologize 'different' lifestyles and family configurations. With chapters by leading, international thinkers in the field, this book explores how to think about new feminine scenarios, gender identities, gender dynamics, motherhood, and desire, in light of modern psychoanalytic theories. In presenting how these changing contemporary notions of the feminine challenge classic psychoanalytic theory and practice, this book will compel both training and experienced analysts to think about new psychoanalytic theories and engage with their own prejudices regarding changing notions of the feminine. Offering ideas relevant to psychoanalysis, sociology, gender studies, psychology, and activism, this book will be of great interest to professionals, teachers and students in addition to any with an interest in psychoanalytic theory and women's studies.

"Forming and Reforming Identity" exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old.

The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections--REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE--address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS.
go to the Genders website ]

This volume approaches questions about gender and the politics of appearance from a new perspective by developing the notion of aesthetic labour. Bringing together feminist writing regarding the 'beauty myth' with recent scholarship about new forms of work, the book suggests that in this moment of ubiquitous photography, social media, and 360 degree surveillance, women are increasingly required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs', maintaining a constant state of vigilance about their appearance. The collection shows that this work is not just on the surface of bodies, but requires a transformation of subjectivity itself, characterised by notions of personal choice, risk-taking, self-management, and individual responsibility. The book includes analyses of online media, beauty service work, female genital cosmetic surgery, academic fashion, self-help literature and the seduction community, from a range of countries. Discussing beauty politics, postfeminism, neoliberalism, labour and subjectivity, the book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in Gender, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Social Psychology and Management Studies. "This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neoliberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearance have escalated to new, unforgiving levels. A special strength of the book is its emphasis on the rise of 'aesthetic labour' as a global, transnational and ever-colonizing phenomenon that seeks to sweep up women of all races, ages and locales into its disciplinary grip. Highly recommended." -Susan J Douglas, University of Michigan, USA the inherited responsibility that remains women's particular burden to manage." -Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA "This book incisively conceptualizes how neo-liberalist and postfeminist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamour, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public. In a moment when YouTube 'makeup how to' videos receive millions of hits; what to wear and how to wear it blogs clock massive followings; and staying 'on brand' is sold to us as the key to personal and financial success, 'aesthetic entrepreneurship' is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the 21st century." -Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA

Writing in response to war and national crisis, al-Samm?n, Khal?feh, Barak?t, and others introduced into the Arabic literary canon aesthetic forms capable of carrying Levantine women's experiences. By assessing their feminism in such a way, this book aims to revive a critical emphasis on aesthetics in Arab women's writing.

For thirty-four years Sister Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun and doctor of osteopathy, served one of the nation's most impoverished towns and regions, Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi Delta. In 1983, she reopened the Tutwiler Clinic, which had remained closed for five years, as no other physician was willing to serve in Tallahatchie County. Starting with only two other nuns and regularly working twelve-hour days, Brooks's patient load - in a region where seven out of ten patients that walked in her door had no way to pay for care - grew from thirty to forty individuals per month her first year to more than 8,500 annually. Sally Palmer Thomason tells the powerful story of Sister Anne Brooks, beginning with her tumultuous childhood, the contracting and overcoming of crippling arthritis in early adulthood, and her near-unprecedented decision to attend medical school at the age of forty. Dr. Brooks's remarkable dedication and accomplishments in caring for the health and well-being of both the individuals and the community of Tutwiler attracted ongoing attention and was often featured in national publications and media, including People magazine and 60 Minutes. Thomason not only shares Brooks's powerful story but reveals, through excerpts from journal entries, letters, and interviews, the intimate musings that connect Brooks's faith in God to her profound compassion for others. Whether it is Brooks's efforts to desegregate Tutwiler or provide free healthcare, her constant devotion to others is striking.