In this introductory text for A level students and undergraduates, Jane Pilcher covers the main issues debated about women in Britain today. Subjects covered include:

* women and gender: sociological perspectives
* education and training
* women and paid work
* household work and caring
* love and sexuality
* crime and punishment
* politics and participation.

Providing a clear sociological analysis of central debates and an introduction to the main theoretical arguments as well as including discussions of further areas of interest, such as women and the media, and the body, this text will provide an invaluable resource for all students in sociology and womens studies and will be of interest to all those wishing to know more about contemporary society in Britain.

Womens Worlds in England presents a unique collection of source materials on womens lives in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The book introduces a wonderfully diverse group of women and a series of voices that have rarely been heard in history, from Deborah Brackley, a poor Devon servant, to Katharine Whitstone, Oliver Cromwells sister, and Queen Anne. Drawing on unpublished, archival materials, Womens Worlds explores the everyday lives of ordinary early modern women, including their:
* experiences of work, sex, marriage and motherhood
* beliefs and spirituality
* political activities
* relationships
* mental worlds
In a time when few women could write, this book reveals the multitude of ways in which their voices and experiences leave traces in the written record, and deepens and challenges our understanding of womens lives in the past.

Film maker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the 'infinite relation'of word to image. Cinema Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, music and language, life and theory, with Homi Bhabba, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist's ideas and visions. Extensively illustrated in colour and black and white, Cinema Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning 'the third term' or the 'space between'- between viewer, maker and film; image, sound and text; or else, between different sets of fictions, different forms of blindness and lucidity; between love and resistance. While discussing the films' perspectives on the shifting realities of China and Vietnam, the interviews also expand on the roles played by such concepts as residue, resonance, repetition, indirectness and foreignness in the creative proces. The complete scripts of Trinh's films Shoot for the Contents and A Tale of Love are also included. Cinema Interval will be an essential work for readers interested in contemporary film art, cultural politics, feminist thought and postcolonial studies.

The first fully-fledged ethnography on health-related issues to come out of contemporary Vietnam, this study of women's lives in a rural commune in Vietnam's Red River delta examines the impact of Vietnam's ambitious family planning policy on the health and lives of rural women.

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region's highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women's movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces' organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

In this text, the author Philippa Berry rewrites critical perceptions of death in Shakespeare's tragedies from a feminist perspective. Drawing on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, Berry challenges existing critical notions of what is "fundamental" to Shakespearean tragedy. She argues that there is a figurative rejection of death as terminus, which owes more to pagan thought than Christian. Through a close reading of the main tragedies, Berry discovers a sensuous and meditative Shakespearean discourse of materialism. Her theoretical and textual insights into the properties of matter, time, the soul, and the body now have relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

This book explores the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality from the past to the present and is unique in extending the discussion to focus on contemporary and emerging identities. Nikki Hayfield draws on research from psychology and the social sciences to offer a detailed and in-depth exploration of the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality. The book discusses how early sexologists' understood gender and sexuality within a binary model and how this provided the underpinnings of bisexual invisibility. The existing research on biphobia and bisexual marginalisation is synthesised to explore how bisexuality has often been invisible or invalidated. Hayfield then evidences clear examples of the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality within education, employment, mainstream mass media, and the wider culture. Throughout the book there is consideration of the impact that this invisibility and invalidation has on people's sense of identity and on their health and wellbeing. It concludes with a discussion of how bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality have become somewhat more visible than in the past and the potential that visibility holds for recognition and representation. This is fascinating reading for students and academics interested in in bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexual spectrum identities and for those who have a personal interest in bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality.

An analysis of the part played by women in the Russian revolution. It aims to show that the extent of female activists' participation in the events of 1917 was far wider that has hitherto been thought.

In reading The Lesbian Polyamory Reader: Open Relationships, Non-Monogamy, and Casual Sex, you'll quickly discover that the steps toward love and happiness are as easy as 1, 2, 3, and maybe even 4 or 5. And you'll find that if your own lesbian relationship lies outside the "traditional monogamous couple" model, you're definitely not alone. You'll explore many multifaceted and multifarious love relationships, each one applicable to your own liking, if you so choose. You'll find successful models of relationship styles--regardless of your own orientation--from cover to cover, and you'll discover the pleasing polyphony in the many, many female voices of authorities on love and love relationships.Whereas other similar studies project the limited view of one or two authors, The Lesbian Polyamory Reader calls upon a broad scope of writers, professional women and academics alike. You'll see that outside the gay rights movement that currently pushes for a traditional, monogamous marriage model of gay couplehood, there lies pleasing multiplicity in the arms and hearts of lesbians worldwide. Specifically, this collection offers: "first person" articles--stories that describe a variety of lesbian experiences relating to multiple lovers in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s "how-to" articles--descriptions of the various polyamorous relationship configurations, including ways of dealing with jealousy "theoretical" pieces--the history of multiple relationships, the social implications of practicing a love style other than monogamous coupling, and safer sex considerations Much, much more than a book on personal satisfaction, The Lesbian Polyamory Reader also focuses on the social implications of this love phenomenon, bringing it into a more inclusive circle of discussion for lesbians, educators, and students of sociology and sexology. You'll find satisfaction in seeing the love so many lesbian women have achieved by not mimicking the "marriage model" of living.

In reading The Lesbian Polyamory Reader: Open Relationships, Non-Monogamy, and Casual Sex, you'll quickly discover that the steps toward love and happiness are as easy as 1, 2, 3, and maybe even 4 or 5. And you'll find that if your own lesbian relationship lies outside the "traditional monogamous couple" model, you're definitely not alone. You'll explore many multifaceted and multifarious love relationships, each one applicable to your own liking, if you so choose. You'll find successful models of relationship styles--regardless of your own orientation--from cover to cover, and you'll discover the pleasing polyphony in the many, many female voices of authorities on love and love relationships.Whereas other similar studies project the limited view of one or two authors, The Lesbian Polyamory Reader calls upon a broad scope of writers, professional women and academics alike. You'll see that outside the gay rights movement that currently pushes for a traditional, monogamous marriage model of gay couplehood, there lies pleasing multiplicity in the arms and hearts of lesbians worldwide. Specifically, this collection offers: "first person" articles--stories that describe a variety of lesbian experiences relating to multiple lovers in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s "how-to" articles--descriptions of the various polyamorous relationship configurations, including ways of dealing with jealousy"theoretical" pieces--the history of multiple relationships, the social implications of practicing a love style other than monogamous coupling, and safer sex considerationsMuch, much more than a book on personal satisfaction, The Lesbian Polyamory Reader also focuses on the social implications of this love phenomenon, bringing it into a more inclusive circle of discussion for lesbians, educators, and students of sociology and sexology. You'll find satisfaction in seeing the love so many lesbian women have achieved by not mimicking the "marriage model" of living.

In this major new book, renowned art historian Griselda Pollock makes a compelling intervention into a debate at the very centre of feminist art history: should the traditional canon of the Old Masters be rejected, replaced or reformed? What difference can a feminist approach to art history make?
Differencing the Canon moves between feminist re-readings of modern masters - Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet - and the canonical artists of feminist art history Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt. Pollock asks both how women read and what might be different about art made by a woman. Pollock unpacks the representation of culturally resonant female figures in a range of texts, from Manet's depiction of the model Jeanne Duval in his painting Olympia, to Charlotte Brontë's Lucy Snowe, artists representations of Cleopatra and Angela Carter's Black Venus. She argues that it is not enough simply to read as a woman; we must also acknowledge the differences between women shaped by racist and colonial hierarchies.

In pointing to the way in which women have been historically represented (or left out altogether) and the reality of women's lives, feminist performance makes the histories, lives and desires of women visible, as this volume of plays from the 1990s aims to illustrate. Historical focus is shared by all three plays in this volume, as is the stylistic challenge which they offer to the "malestream" version of history. In "Walking on Peas", Erika Bloch takes the "hidden", unknown historical lives of women who cross-dressed and joined the army as its subject. Foursight Theatre has made looking at history through "the eyes of women such as Eva Braun, Pope Joan, Mae West and Ulrike Meinhof" a key focus of their work. Their group devised a one-act play on Mary Tudor and Queen Elizabeth I, "Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen". Julie Wilkinson's "Mrs. Beeton's History of the World" fuses the "great" and the "ordinary" by representing Mrs Beeton in juxtaposition with the figure of her working-clas maid, Caroline.

Working Girls investigates the thematic concerns of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and its ambivalent articulation of women as both active, and defined by sexual performance, asking whether new Hollywood cinema has responded to feminism and contemporary sexual identities.
Whether analysing the rise of films centred around female friendships, or the entrance of pop stars such as Whitney Houston and Madonna into film, Working Girls is an authoritative investigation of the presence of women both as film makers and actors in contemporary mainstream cinema.

The Victorian debate on marriage, motherhood and women's rights to an independent life reflects the impact the women's movement had on the formation and transformation of public opinion. The marriage debate was also about the New Woman, the "fin-de-siecle" representation of the feminist. This anthology contextualizes key feminist texts and ideas by connecting them to the public response they received. The first volume focuses on Mona Caird's "The Morality of Marriage" and the widespread controversy it provoked. The second volume widens the debate between feminists, traditionalists and anti-feminists by linking the public discourse on marriage and divorce to the controversy of the New Woman, a debate initiated and sustained by Sarah Grand's writings. The third and fourth volumes are concerned with New Woman fiction, providing selected reading from feminist and anti-feminist works, and reproducing the media debate on morality in literature. The fiction is taken from the writings of: Emma Brooke, Mona Caird, Gertrude Dix, Lady Florence Dixie, Emma Hepworth Dixon and George Egerton.

Full Contributors:
Maria Black and Rosalind Coward, Ann Bodine, Deborah Cameron, Kate Clark, Jennifer Coates, Margaret Doyle, Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King, Pamela Fishman, Kira Hall, Douglas Hofstadter, Lucie Irigaray, Otto Jespersen, Cora Kaplan, Robin Lakoff, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Sara Mills, Trin T. Minh-ha, Felly Nkweto Simmonds, Dale Spender, Deborah Tannen, Aki Uchida, Virginia Woolf

This work explores the diversity and complexity of women's perceptions and reactions to their own "lifeworlds" in their own words. Examining the changing meaning of "place" in women's lives over time and across space, this book questions how women face, negotiate and shape the social space of their environment. Personal narratives are presented by 15 women of various age groups, from different cultural, religious, social and geographical backgrounds, from Mexican politician, Muslim psychiatrist, Finnish housewife to Indian guru and African rural woman. Writing about the lives of their grandmothers, mothers, themselves, their daughters or other close female relatives, the authors of these life narratives cross generational and cultural divides and share perceptions with each other. The result is a collection of life stories of 54 women in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, covering a period of more than 100 years, highlighting women's personal perceptions of the basic dimensions of their lives, their sources of strength and the things that bring meaning to their lives.

Femininity Played Straight traces the changing relationships of lesbianism and feminist theory from the late 1970s to the present, arguing for accounts of sexuality, gender and subjectivity that make lesbianism intelligible and important.

The first-ever biography of Mozhdah Jamalzadah: refugee, pop singer, and champion of women's rights. Many have tried to silence her, but Mozhdah Jamalzadah remains the most powerful female voice of her generation in Afghanistan, boldly speaking out about women's rights. Voice of Rebellion charts her incredible journey, including arriving in Canada as a child refugee, setting her father's protest poem to music (and making it a #1 hit), performing that song for Michelle and Barack Obama, and, finally, being invited to host her own show in Afghanistan. The Mozhdah Show earned her the nickname "The Oprah of Afghanistan" and tackled taboo subjects like divorce and domestic violence for the first time in the country's history. But even as her words resonated with women and families, Mozhdah received angry death threats-some of them serious-and was eventually advised to return to Canada. Traversing Central Asia and North America, Voice of Rebellion profiles a devoted singer and activist who continues to fight for change, even from afar.

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women's magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper's Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book's analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity's broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women's Magazines extends recent research into modernism's circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women's magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism's public profile.

"Black British Feminism: A Reader" reveals the historic development and important academic direction of black British feminism. This unique collection of key texts and writings by Black British women of Pacific, Asian, African, Caribbean and Latina descent living in Britain is essential reading for those interested in cultural and women's studies, sociology, and postcolonial studies.
Part 1: Shaping The Debate explores the early direction of Black feminist scholars in Britain, while Part II: Defining Our Space demonstrates the shift in the 1990s of exploring intellectual possibilities while continuing to challenge cultural imperialism in its many forms. Part III: Changing the Future looks ahead to new directions and opportunities for change engendered by a Black feminist perspective.

In Feminism in Coalition Liza Taylor examines how US women of color feminists' coalitional politics provides an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism. Taylor charts the theorization of coalition in the work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and others. For these activist-scholars, coalition is a dangerous struggle that emerges from a shared political commitment to undermining oppression and an emphasis on self-transformation. Taylor shows how their coalitional understandings of group politics, identity, consciousness, and scholarship have transformed how activists and theorists build alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, and ethnicity to tackle systems of domination. Their coalitional politics enrich current discussions surrounding the impetus and longevity of effective activism, present robust theoretical accounts of political subject formation and political consciousness, and demonstrate the promise of collective modes of scholarship. In this way, women of color feminists have been formulating solutions to long-standing problems in political theory. By illustrating coalition's vitality to a variety of practical and philosophical interdisciplinary discussions, Taylor encourages us to rethink feminist and political theory.

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female.
A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and modify recognisable tropes from the romance genre to reflect a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural climate. As such, Roche argues, these novels function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging those contemporary gender ideologies. Throughout the book, Roche addresses and critiques several key attributes of neoliberal postfeminism, including: a pervasive emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility; an insistent requirement for self-monitoring, self-surveillance, and bodywork; the celebration of consumerism and its associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one's 'negative' emotions; and the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women's empowerment. While much critical attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, Roche argues that one crucial repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how these ideologies function together to effectively sanction gender-based violence. Thus, Roche exploits textual analysis to demonstrate the subtle ways in which neoliberal postfeminism can augment women's vulnerability to male violence.

In this book, Margaret Atwood's dystopian novels-The Handmaid's Tale, The MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last and The Testaments-are analyzed from the perspective provided by the combined views of the construction of the posthuman subject in its interactions with science and technology, and the Anthropocene as a cultural field of enquiry. Posthumanist critical concerns try to dismantle anthropocentric notions of the human and defend the need for a closer relationship between humanity and the environment. Supported by the exemplification of the generic characteristics of the cli-fi genre, this book discusses the effects of climate change, at the individual level, and as a collective threat that can lead to a "world without us." Moreover, Margaret Atwood is herself the constant object of extensive academic interest and Posthuman theory is widely taught, researched and explored in almost every intellectual field. My book is aimed at world-wide readers, not only those interested in Margaret Atwood's oeuvre, but also those interested in the debate between critical posthumanism and transhumanism, together with the ethical implications of living in the Anthropocene era regarding our daily lives and practices. It will be especially attractive for academics: university teachers, post-graduates, researchers, and college students in general.

This is the first book to examine the growing movement of organised networks of LGBT+ football supporters, exploring activists' biographies and the meanings they ascribe to participation in identity politics-centred social movements. The book draws upon in-depth original research into the Pride in Football LGBT+ football supporters' network in the UK, alongside comparative material from other countries. It is also the first book to apply a cultural relational sociological framework to the study of football fans and supporters' groups, marking an important theoretical step forward that opens up new perspectives in the sociology of sport, the sociology of collective action and social movements, and the sociologies of genders and sexualities in the twenty-first century world. As the struggle for cultural rights and recognition of LGBT+ communities continues, with football fandom providing an important site for understanding of these issues given its historically-embedded hegemonic masculine culture, and in the aftermath of gay male football player Jake Daniels' 'coming out' in May 2022, the book offers timely insights into new social movements, the consumption of sport and the experiences of people from a diversity of sexualities. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, football, fandom, gender, sexualities, social theory or social movements.