The essays in this volume analyse feminism's positioning vis-a-vis international law and the current paradigms of international law. The authors argue that, willingly or unwillingly, feminist perspectives on international law have come to be situated between 'resistance' and 'compliance'. That is, feminist scholarship aims at deconstructing international law to show why and how 'women' have been marginalised; at the same time feminists have been largely unwilling to challenge the core of international law and its institutions, remaining hopeful of international law's potential for women. The analysis is clustered around three themes: the first part, theory and method, looks at how feminist perspectives on international law have developed and seeks to introduce new theoretical and methodological tools (especially through a focus on psychoanalysis and geography). The second part, national and international security, focuses on how feminists have situated themselves in relation to the current discourses of 'crisis', the post-9/11 NGO 'industry' and the changing discourses of violence against women. The third part, global and local justice, addresses some of the emerging trends in international law, focusing especially on transitional justice, state-building, trafficking and economic globalisation.

Based on interviews with pregnant women, this book provides a multi-disciplinary empirical account of pregnant embodiment and how it relates to wider sociological and feminist discourses about gender, bodies, 'fitness', 'fat', celebrity and motherhood.

Camus' L'Etranger (The Outsider) has become one of the most widely read books of modern literature. The essays contained in this book celebrate its continuing influence throughout the world. Contributors come from Algeria, Samoa, India, Russia, France, Britain and the US. Also included are essays by prominent French and English-language authors for whom the novel has been an influential expression of contemporary sensibility. Other essays include feminist interpretations of Meursault, studies of Camus' narrative form, and explorations of the Algerian setting of the novel. Comparative studies show Camus' relation to the New Novel, to Greene and Orwell and to Jules Roy. Other books by Adele King include Camus, French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style and Proust.

Thirteen essays explore the varying virtual, physical, cultural and institutional contexts influencing the nature of electronic space for women and explore the intersection of feminisms, power, authority, voice, and computer technologies. It also contains four interviews with prominent scholars, which historicize the disciplinary formation of computers and composition and the impact of technology on the professional lives of women. This collection continues the ongoing conversation exploring the theoretical, pedagogical, and political implications of computer technologies for composition studies, with an primary audience of teachers and theorists of writing in electronic environments.

Contemporary feminists face the labor of moving beyond the dominant paradigms of knowledge and communication that drive corporate globalization. "Dialogue and Difference," a new collection edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, provides students with groundbreaking essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists who stress the need to put different approaches to reality and to scholarship into relation in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South, East/West divides. Modeling ways to weave these connections, the authors take difference, rather than isomorphic similarity, to be the basis for effective anti-imperial feminist theory and practice. These dialogues among women's movements bridge profound differences in historical, economic, and political circumstance, language, culture, and fundamental "cosmovision." Such differences are welcomed by contributors as practical resources, rather than as obstacles, in feminist challenges to corporate globalization. "Dialogue and Difference" is an essential collection for professors and students interested in globalization, development, gender studies, and activism.

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, an "illuminating" (New York Times Book Review) history of white male identity. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? Through the last 150 years of American history -- from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics -- Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.

From the Edo-period works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon and Saikaku Iharu, to modern texts by Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, and Nobel-prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, the Japanese literary canon is filled with works about the demimonde, or karyukai. After years of being closed off to Western influences on both its literature and social policy, Japan fully opened up to the West in the late nineteenth century and finally abolished legalized prostitution in 1956. Until then, the idea of a space set aside for sexuality, like Tokyo's Yoshiwara district, had been a powerful catalyst in structuring stories about the demimonde, and in fact, narratives about the demimonde have continued to flourish in Japan even in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, even though the actual physical space of the traditional karyukai has disappeared. In breadth and accomplishment, Japan's demimonde literature rivals that of any other national literature; yet very little work analyzing the cultural, psychological, and textual significance of this space has been published to date. What is more, bringing comparative approaches to Japanese literary studies is a relatively new phenomenon, but Western literature is essential to understanding both the wider context in which demimonde literature blossomed, as well as to probing what is unique about Japan's karyukai-themed texts. The Demimonde in Japanese Literature applies both a comparativist approach and psychoanalytic models to the examination of the literary karyukai in a way that allows for a penetrating and multi-dimensional reading of its meaning in works produced during Japan's tumultuous twentieth century. This book analyzes representations of the demimonde in Japanese literature and other arts from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1990s, through fiction, critical essays, films, photographs, and performances by Nagai Kafu, Koda Aya, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kuki Shuzo, Mishima Yukio, Hosoe Eikoh, Tamura Taijiro, Murakami Ryu, Ohno Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio. Throughout the book, the author views the demimonde in general and the karyukai in particular through the changing paradigms of spatial terms and configurations in the twentieth-century Japanese imagination. In some narratives written during the pre-World War II period, for instance, the karyukai is distanced from the reader by the connoisseur as a way of containing and idealizing it in 1930s Japan, in a climate of intense censorship and military imperialism; in others it is chronicled as disruptive to public space, its values and fetishes spreading into new physical spaces in the tumultuous interwar Tokyo metropole. During the postwar era, as the book's close readings show, the demimonde is often shown to transcend psychic space via the taboo movement of memory, and occasionally it is internalized in the text via a celebration of small spaces and a poetics of dwelling. Surveying such a variety of writings and artists allows for a thorough analysis of the representation of the space of the demimonde not just in literary texts, but in films, photographs, and dance/performance art as well. The study also draws on comparative examples from Western demimonde texts, especially those that were pivotal for Japanese writers and artists, and she uses them to formulate a complex argument about the socio-cultural, psychological, aesthetic, literary, and political significance of the space of the karyukai. The book also helpfully includes translated passages from books that were not previously translated in their entirety into English, including Koda Aya's Nagareru. The Demimonde in Japanese Literature is an important book for all Asian studies, comparative literature, and women's studies collections.

Alison Horbury investigates the reprisal of the myth of Persephone - a mother-daughter plot of separation and initiation - in post-feminist television cultures where, she argues, it functions as a symptom expressing a complex around the question of sexual difference - what Lacan calls 'sexuation', where this question has been otherwise foreclosed.

Popular culture is awash with discussions about the difficulties associated with being a man. Television talk shows, media articles and government press releases discuss not simply the problem of men, but have more recently focused on the problems of being a man. The Conundrum of Masculinity challenges highly advertised beliefs that men are in crisis and struggling to hold onto traditional masculine habits whilst the world around them changes. Indeed, whilst there is a range of valuable contributions to the field that examine how men live out their lives in different contexts, there are few accounts that examine in detail the building blocks of masculinity or how men are really 'put together'. Thus, this innovative and timely volume seeks to provide a systematic exploration of the different aspects of masculinity - in particular hegemony, homosociality, homophobia and heteronormativity. An original approach to the field of masculinity studies, this book ultimately presents a critical synthesis that brings together disparate approaches to provide a clear and concise discussion to address the true nature of masculinity. The Conundrum of Masculinity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Masculinity Studies and Sociology.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend provides the first feminist analysis of both the Arthurian section of The History of the Kings of Britain and The Life of Merlin. Fiona Tolhurst argues that because Geoffrey creates nontraditional and unusually powerful female figures, he stands outside of - and works against the misogyny of - the medieval literary tradition. This study employs the strategies of both historicist and New Historicist critics and adds a new dimension to existing scholarship by proposing that the word 'feminist' can be used to describe a medieval text that presents female figures meaningfully and, in most cases, positively.

This book provides a comprehensive study of the neglected story of the involvement of the women's movement with criminal justice policy in the 20th century. Taking the topic from the 'suffragette' era to the early days of 'second-wave' feminism, the book argues that criminal justice policy has been a continual concern for feminists.

An exploration of the representations of the women's movement, its members, and their goals between 1968 and 2008 in the British and American press. Examining over 1100 news articles, the book analyses the nuanced ways feminism has historically been supported, marginalized and debated in the mainstream press.

This collection of essays (1891) is an unparalleled statement of black feminist thought in the nineteenth century, and is considered to be one of the original texts of the black feminist movement. Cooper came of age in a period of conservatism in the black community, a time when Afro-American intellectual and political ideas were dominated by men. At the heart of her work is a belief that the status of black women, the most oppressed group of all, is the only true measure of collective racial progress.

While social movements from workers' rights campaigns to environmental justice coalitions publicize their struggles by narrating people's experiences, recent critiques of "experience" and "identity" challenge the authority of such texts. How can we acknowledge the dangers of appeals to experience and identity, and yet still use the powerful tools of storytelling to counter ideological narratives? Bringing together the work of Hannah Arendt and transnational feminist theory, Shari Stone-Mediatore investigates the role that narration can play in resistant knowledge and politics. She argues that "storytelling," although not objective truth, is nonetheless crucial to responsible public debate, and identifies the specific narrative practices that impede, and those that facilitate, feminist and democratic struggles.

This volume offers a wide-reaching overview of current academic research on women's participation in combat sports within a range of different national and trans-national contexts, detailing many of the struggles and opportunities experienced by women at various levels of engagement within sports such as boxing, wrestling, and mixed martial arts.

"The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion" develops alternative accounts of feminist field formation, contrasting the explanatory possibilities of approaches drawn from the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and Foucauldian archaeology. These accounts illuminate intricate and unexpected connections between a prominent feminist journal and geopolitical forces, such as the Cold War, increased federal funding for higher education, changing priorities within philanthropic foundations, and the emergence of development studies and subfields such as Women in Development. By complicating the history of academic feminism, the book offers new insights into the contours of transnational feminist scholarship in relation to key concepts advanced by U.S. scholars of color.

In what might seem an unusual pairing, Elizabeth Bartlett brings together the insights of Albert Camus and feminist thought, and in so doing sheds new light on both. Looking through a Camusian lens, Bartlett reveals a "rebellious feminism" that simultaneously refuses oppression and affirms human dignity in solidarity with concrete, diverse others and the earth, giving us new insights into this life-affirming ethic.

This book redefines the origins of the nineteenth-century women's rights campaigns in Britain, demonstrating that a vibrant, but previously neglected feminist network existed during the 1830s and 1840s. Gleadle demonstrates that these reformers, whom she terms the 'radical unitarians', must be understood within the context of the contemporary Unitarian culture. She shows how their desire to transform society and elevate women's position led them to embark upon many groundbreaking campaigns. This pioneering work fed directly into the women's rights movement of the subsequent decades.

The first anthology to collect essays focusing on the legal rights of women of color around the world Global Critical Race Feminism is the first anthology to focus explicitly on the legal rights of women of color around the world. Containing nearly thirty essays, the book addresses such topical themes as responses to white feminism; the flashpoint issue of female genital mutilation; the intersections of international law with U.S. law; "Third World" women in the "First World;" violence against women; and the global workplace. Broadly representative, the reader addresses the role and status-legal and otherwise-of women in such countries as Cuba, New Zealand, France, Serbia, Nicaragua, Colombia, South Africa, Japan, China, Australia, Ghana, and many others. Authors include: Aziza al-Hibri, Penelope Andrews, Taimie Bryant, Devon Carbado, Mai Chen, Brenda Cossman, Lisa Crooms, Mary Dudziak, Isabelle Gunning, Anna Han, Berta Hernandez, Laura Ho, Sharon Hom, Rosemary King, Kiyoko Knapp, Hope Lewis, Martha Morgan, Zorica Mrsevic, Vasuki Nesiah, Leslye Obiora, Gaby Ore-Aguilar, Catherine Powell, Jenny Rivera, Celina Romany, Judy Scales-Trent, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, J. Clay Smith, and Leti Volpp.

The past century witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of modern Chinese women and gender politics. Whilst some revolutionary actions to rectify the feudalist patriarchy, such as foot-binding and polygyny were first seen in the late Qing period; the termination of the Qing Dynasty and establishment of Republican China in 1911-1912 initiated truly nation-wide constitutional reform alongside increasing gender egalitarianism. This book traces the radical changes in gender politics in China, and the way in which the lives, roles and status of Chinese women have been transformed over the last one hundred years. In doing so, it highlights three distinctive areas of development for modern Chinese women and gender politics: first, women's equal rights, freedom, careers, and images about their modernized femininity; second, Chinese women's overseas experiences and accomplishments; and third, advances in Chinese gender politics of non-heterosexuality and same-sex concerns. This book takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on film, history, literature, and personal experience. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, women's studies, gender studies and gender politics.

Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition. Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists' investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing: Charles Darwin's understanding of transformation and sexual difference Edward O. Wilson's evolutionary mythology and the evolution-creationism controversy Richard Dawkins' molecular agency and new imaging technologies the connections between adultery, infertility and homosexuality in adaptationist thought. Through popular, literary and scientific texts, the book identifies both the imaginative potential and the structural weaknesses in evolutionary narratives, opening them up for feminist and queer revision. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly in gender studies, cultural studies, literature, sexualities, and science and technology studies.

Women's soap opera viewing has long been thought of by feminists and nonfeminists as an unproductive waste of time. Blumenthal takes the opposing view, arguing that women's "indulgence" in these programs is actually liberating. In overcoming the social opposition to the stigma attached to the feminine content and style, and engaging in soap opera viewing, women celebrate their femininity, particularly their gendered identification with romance, relationality, intuitiveness, talkativeness, and other aspects of emotionality. This book will be of interest to academics in the areas of sociology, women's studies, and media studies.

Rationality and Feminist Philosophy argues that the Enlightenment conception of rationality that feminists are fond of attacking is no longer a live concept. Deborah K. Heikes shows how contemporary theories of rationality are consonant with many feminist concerns and proposes that feminists need a substantive theory of rationality, which she argues should be a virtue theory of rationality. Within both feminist and non-feminist philosophical circles, our understanding of rationality depends upon the concept's history. Heikes traces the development of theories of rationality from Descartes through to the present day, examining the work of representative philosophers of the Enlightenment and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She discusses feminist concerns with rationality as understood by each philosopher discussed and also focuses on the deeper problems that lie outside specifically feminist issues. She goes on to consider how each conception of rationality serves to ground the broadly conceived feminist philosophical goals of asserting the reality and injustice of oppression. She ultimately concludes that a virtue rationality may serve feminist needs well, without the accompanying baggage of Enlightenment rationality. >

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.