Voices from the Asylum is a fascinating investigation of the lives of four women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The renowned sculptor (and mistress of Rodin) Camille Claudel, the musician Hersilie Rouy, the feminist activist Marie Esquiron, and the self-proclaimed mystic and eccentric Pauline Lair Lamotte, all left first-hand accounts of their experiences. These rare and unsettling documents provide the foundation for a unique insight into the experience of psychiatric breakdown and treatment from the patient's viewpoint.
By linking the question of gender to the process of medical diagnosis made by contemporary clinicians such as Sigmund Freud, this book argues that psychiatric medicine functioned as an integral part of an essentially misogynistic and oppressive society. Wilson suggests that "delusional" utterances can be read as meaningful when read as metaphorical expressions of real suffering, and as strategies to ensure the survival of a self under threat. These narratives therefore constituted an act of resistance on the part of the women who wrote them, and they prefigure the feminist revisionist histories of psychiatry that appeared later in the twentieth century.
Straddling the disciplines of literature and social history, and based on extensive archival research, this book makes an important contribution to the feminist project of writing women back into literary history. It brings to light a remarkable but hitherto unrecognised literary tradition in the prehistory of psychoanalysis: the psychiatric memoir.

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and the workplace.

Thousands of diverse museums, including art galleries and heritage sites, exist around the world today and they draw millions of people, audiences who come to view the exhibitions and artefacts and equally importantly, to learn from them about the world and themselves. This makes museums active public educators who imagine, visualise, represent and story the past and the present with the specific aim of creating knowledge. Problematically, the visuals and narratives used to inform visitors are never neutral. Feminist cultural and adult education studies have shown that all too frequently they include epistemologies of mastery that reify the histories and deeds of 'great men.' Despite pressures from feminist scholars and professionals, normative public museums continue to be rife with patriarchal ideologies that hide behind referential illusions of authority and impartiality to mask the many problematic ways gender is represented and interpreted, the values imbued in those representations and interpretations and their complicity in the cancellation of women's stories in favour of conventional masculine historical accounts that shore up male superiority, entitlement, privilege, and dominance. Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness problematises museums as it illustrates ways they can be become pedagogical spaces of possibility. This edited volume showcases the imaginative social critique that can be found in feminist exhibitions, and the role that women's museums around the world are attempting to play in terms of transforming our understandings of women, gender, and the potential of museums to create inclusive narratives.

Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging pushes debates about citizenship and feminist politics in new directions, challenging us to think 'beyond citizenship', and to engage in feminist re-theorizations of the experience and politics of belonging. Citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism - promising inclusion yet always enacting exclusions. This book asks whether citizenship is a worthwhile object for feminist politics and scholarship, or whether we should find a different language to express our desires to belong, and alternative means to enact our yearnings for equality, justice and reciprocity. Grounded in feminist perspectives that emphasize the importance of affect, subjectivity, embodiment and the collective, it offers important new analyses of the state of citizenship and meanings of belonging in the contemporary globalizing world. This book is key reading for scholars and students of citizenship, social movements, and feminist and gender theory from a wide range of disciplines, including art practice, comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy, political theory, psychosocial studies, social policy, socio-legal studies, and sociology.

Grassroots Russian women's organizations faced multiple challenges in the early 1990s. Like their members, they were confronted with both potentially hostile attitudes and numerous practical difficulties. Post-Soviet ideologies of gender difference produced a gender climate which was particularly unsympathetic to female activism in support of other women. This book presents a detailed study of grassroots Russian women's organizations in 1991-96, against the background of a careful analysis of gender relations and attitudes to women's place in post-Soviet Russian society.

This book examines contemporary relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women's movements in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, and women's movements' participation in and influence on public policy that focuses on violence against women.

This work explores matrophobia - the fear not of one's mother or of motherhood but of becoming one's mother - in past and present white feminist analyses of motherhood and mothering. By tracing white second wave feminism's strategic choice to organize first as sisters then as daughters, O'Brien Hallstein argues matrophobia became embedded in past and continues to linger in contemporary feminist analyses. As a result, contemporary analyses reveal crucially important but limited understandings of contemporary motherhood and mothering. This important work concludes that matrophobia can be reduced and eliminated by reorienting analyses to mutual responsiveness between sisters and daughters, second and third wave feminists.

... cover[s] the effects of the life-cycle experiences of teenage pregnancy and childbearing, divorce, and years of widowhood on women's economic status and poverty rate (the feminization of poverty). . . . Ozawa finds a conflict between women's traditional nurturing and caring roles and the development of their earning capability. Interesting statistical tables and a selected bibliography. Choice Gender, like race and ethnicity, is an increasingly important factor in assessing social policy in the U.S. For those who want to understand the role of gender in the poverty problem today, Women's Life Cycle and Economic Insecurity provides a splendid collection of articles containing new knowledge and fresh insights. Sheila B. Kamerman Columbia University School of Social Work According to a global United Nations study, women perform 66 percent of all work, but receive only 10 percent of all income and own less than 1 percent in material assets. Although the economic status of American women has been somewhat higher than that of women globally, it is increasingly apparent that the United States is facing the emerging social problem of women's economic insecurity in the midst of growing affluence. In this timely study, ten experts methodically survey every vital aspect in the life of American women, from early sex-role socialization in the home to long-term elderly care, and examine their economic implications. Ozawa's introductory chapter provides a helpful overview of the subject; her concluding chapter summarizes recommendations for change and proposes steps necessary to the establishment of economic and social equality between the sexes. In Educational Preparation of American Women, Shirley M. Clark analyzes female socialization and discusses women in higher education: enrollment trends, degrees earned, and women faculty. James P. Smith's chapter investigates Women, Mothers, and Work and considers wage prospects. Other chapters explore teenage pregnancy: patterns, consequences, and prevention strategies; divorce and child support issues, the history and effects of inheritance, old age, and care of the elderly. The text is enhanced by twenty-five tables and eight figures that present vital statistical information, including labor force participation rates of various groups of women, data relating to children and their care, fertility, income, life expectancy, and health. Women's Life Cycle and Economic Insecurity presents a comprehensive assessment of the condition of women in the United States today. This groundbreaking study provides insights and statistics that will be especially useful for research in the areas of women's studies, sociology, economics, and American history.

This book opens up a new field at the intersections of transnational, feminist, and media studies. The collection brings feminist theories to bear on the discourses of transnationality embedded in a range of recent films and video art from diverse locations in North Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Paying particular attention to new frontiers of migration, an increasing vigilance vis-a-vis the foreign, and the gendered and racialized representations of mobility, the book charts innovative feminist strategies for the interpretation of contemporary visual cultures. This ambitious volume will be an important guide for scholars and students interested in approaching global media cultures from transnational feminist perspectives

What are the political and aesthetic dimensions of video art, documentary, and global cinema in contemporary image culture? Here, Lynes makes visible how sites of political struggle, exploitation, and armed conflict can be theorized and interpreted through a feminist politics of location, attentive to the frictions and flows within transnational circuits of exchange. Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits traces how formal modes of experimentation provide prismatic visions of sites of political struggle - multiple, mediated points of view - and thus open space for complex and emancipatory relations among cultural producers, activists, and viewers in a globalized present.

As the Victorian era drew to a close, American culture experienced a vast transformation. In many ways, the culture changed even more rapidly and profoundly for women. The "new woman," the "new freedom," and the "sexual revolution" all referred to women moving out of the Victorian home and into the public realm that men had long claimed as their own.

Modern middle-class women made a distinction between emotional styles that they considered Victorian and those they considered modern. They expected fulfillment in marriage, companionship, and career, and actively sought up-to-date versions of love and happiness, relieved that they lived in an age free from taboo and prudery.

Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of women from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic regions, this volume offers insights into middle-class women's experiences of American culture in this age of transition. It documents the ways in which that culture--including new technologies, advertising, and movies--shaped women's emotional lives and how these women appropriated the new messages and ideals. In addition, the authors describe the difficulties that women encountered when emotional experiences failed to match cultural expectations.

This collection brings together seventeen essays by well-known feminist scholars across the disciplines that make up Renaissance Studies. It forms an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract 'Renaissance Man' of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender in the formation of European modernity.

The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries.
The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and economic foundations of a society are de- and then re-structured. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body, especially the female body, and the larger, cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly marked sites to witness the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change.
This groundbreaking volume turns its attention to the Second World, specifically to such subjects as the birth of the sex media and porn industry in Russia; Russian women and alcoholism; cinema in post-communist Hungary; patriotism and gender in Poland; sexual dissidence in Eastern Europe; and women in the former Yugoslavia.

go to the Genders website ]

Classical Presences
Series Editors: Lorna Hardwick, Professor of Classical Studies, Open University, and James I. Porter, Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Laughing with Medusa explores a series of inter-linking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical discourses? Why has psychoanalysis placed myth at the center of its explorations of the modern subject? Why are the Muses feminine? Do the categories of myth and politics intersect or are they mutually exclusive? Does feminism's recourse to myth offer a script of resistance or commit it to an ineffective utopianism? Covering a wide range of subject areas including poetry, philosophy, science, history, and psychoanalysis as well as classics, this book engages with these questions from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. It includes a specially commissioned work of fiction, "Iphigeneia's Wedding," by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

Far from being a conservative writer endorsing women's domestic role, Agatha Christie's book depicts women as adventurous, independent women who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed the dangerous competency to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity. This detailed textual analysis of her oeuvre demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender, beginning in nineteen twenty and concluding in the early seventies.

This volume seeks to spur a lively discussion on Marxist feminist analysis of biblical texts. Marxism and feminism have many mutual concerns, and the combination of the two has become common in literary criticism, cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. So it is high time for biblical studies to become interested. This collection is the first of its kind in biblical studies, bringing together a mixture of newer and more mature voices. It falls into three sections: general concerns (Milena Kirova, Tamara Prosic and David Jobling); Hebrew Bible (Gale Yee and Avaren Ipsen); New Testament (Alan Cadwallader, Jorunn Okland, Roland Boer and Jennifer Bird). Thought-provoking and daring, the collection includes: the history of Marxist feminist analysis, the work of Bertolt Brecht, the voices of prostitute collectives, and the possibilities for biblical criticism of the work of Rosemary Hennessy, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Wilhelm Reich and Julia Kristeva. All of which are brought to bear on biblical texts such as Proverbs, 1 Kings, Mark, Paul's Letters, and 1 Peter.

Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Feminity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing explores the role of women in the current globailized era as active migrants. Silvia Pellicer-Ortin and Julia Kuznetski have brought together a collection of essays from scholars in diaspora, migration and gender studies to take a look at the female experince of migration and globalization by covering topics such as vulnerability, empowerment, trauma, identity, memory, violence and gender contruction, which will continue to shape contemporary literature and the culture at large.

Imagination in Theory focuses on Mich le Barrett's long-standing interest in cultural questions and shows how it informs her analysis of current developments in social and feminist theory. Taking culture, theory, and writing as its themes, the book "translates" across the barriers between the humanities and social sciences, raising a number of important-and controversial-issues.

This study, by two leading scholars in the field, draws on feminist theory and science and technology studies to uncover a basic injustice for the human rights of drug-using women: most women who need drug treatment in the US and UK do not get it. Why not?

This volume is an engaging and provocative collection of essays on contemporary feminist biblical studies. Drawing upon their own social, cultural, and religious backgrounds and experiences, contributors read the New Testament as feminists, placing it in the context of globalization. These biblical interpretations cast gender, race, class, and power relationships as issues inherent in both the content and context of scripture. Calling into question feminist social engagement that does not extend beyond academic halls, churches, and Christians, Feminist New Testament Studies offers new directions for future research and teaching in feminist biblical studies.

Traces the shift in feminist interest in the household from an earlier focus on the uneven division of domestic labour to a more recent emphasis on women's caring activities within the household. The articles in this collection range from classics of the 1970s analyzing domestic labour and its effects on men's and women's employment patterns, through later studies of how women's increased labour force participation impacted on the domestic division of labour, to specifically commissioned articles that introduce some of the latest thinking on the nature of women's caring labour.

Gender as a social class along with its concomitant heteronormative gender coercion seem to be intransigent across time and cultures. But across these cultures we also see a degree of nonconforming behaviour which very often carries significant multi-dimensions of stigma and risk; because the exception proves the rule, an understanding of gender nonconformity sheds light on the normative operation of gender in society. A Feminist Post-transsexual Autoethnography attempts to demythologise trans and gender diversity by conducting an in-depth critical analysis of the life choices of the autoethnographic subject (the author), who was so uncomfortable with their culturally allocated masculinity that they chose to live an apparently normal female life. The research is post-transsexual in that the subject forgoes passing in their affirmed gender to ensure the integrity of the data. A Feminist Post-transsexual Autoethnography may primarily appeal to students and researchers interested in the Sociology of Gender and Sociology of Trans and Gender Diversity, as well as the broader areas of embodiment and power differentials based on gender, class, nationality, location, temporality, sexuality and gender (non)conformity. This insightful volume may also be of interest to those within the fields Health Promotion and Education, Human Rights, Social Justice and Equity or the Social and Cultural Anthropology of Gender.

What has been the impact of this age of transformation on women's lives in China? This wide ranging and interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars from China and the West to examine the many dimensions of debate around gender issues in contemporary China. The experiences of women in education, employment, marriage and the family, in rural and urban areas are analyzed and assessed. Published at a time when there is more open acknowledgement in China of the discrepancy between the language of equality, and experiences of discrimination and inequality.