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.

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. >

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.

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.

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Boston Globe Summer Read "Brooks traces all kinds of lines...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening." -New York Times "A wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyonce and Janelle Monae...Connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers." -Rolling Stone "A gloriously polyphonic book." -Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland How is it possible that iconic artists like Aretha Franklin and Beyonce can be both at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors, and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1994, BRAC, the world's largest NGO, made headlines by putting women's rights centre stage in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. The Gender Quality Action Learning (GQAL) Programme was one of the very first large-scale efforts to mainstream gender equality and aimed to weave objectives of gender equality throughout its own microfinance, education and health services. Advancing Gender Equality in Bangladesh describes the history, implementation, and outcome of this major 20-year initiative and discusses the lessons learnt throughout the fight to achieve gender equality outcomes in an effort to provide a tangible framework for future organizations interested in promoting gender equality and social inclusion. At a time when many gender equality programmes are still relatively young, this book offers a unique opportunity to track 20 years of intervention within a theoretical and cultural context and provides a platform for ongoing discussion about the roles of empowerment and gender transformation as agents for social change. This book provides an in-depth analysis of how strategies for change have operated in practice and will be of considerable interest to students, researchers and practitioners of international development, gender studies and social justice theory as well as those interested in a new practical methodology of the gender role framework.

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.

Sadlier's study of women writers in Portugal after the 1974 revolution is a useful contribution to a neglected European literature, in which women are making a forceful contribution; and it is one of the few sources of such information in English. . . . Works analyzed include the famous Novas Cartas Portuguesas (Lisbon, 1972) by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa, Xerazade e os outros (Lisbon, 1964) by Fernanda Botelho, Lidia Jorge's O Dia dos Prodigios (2nd ed., 1980), Helia Correia's Montedemo (Lisbon, 1983), and Teolindo Gersao's O Silencio (1981). These studies are followed by an appendix on the background of women's rights and feminism in Portugal. Although Sadlier has chosen these works because of their common tradition of literary modernism and aesthetic experimentation, her readings are descriptive rather than theoretical and provide an excellent introduction to representative works and themes of major contemporary women writers. Choice Contemporary Portugal offers a fascinating mixture of social revolution, literary experiment, and feminist practice. Since the revolution in 1974, the country has produced a large number of writings by and about women. In fact, for the first time in Portuguese history, there are at least as many women as men writing books. The Question of How: Women Writers and New Portuguese Literature presents an analysis of texts by the Three Marias, Fernanda Botelho, Lidia Jorge, Helia Correia, and Teolinda Gersao. The first book to be written in English on contemporary Portuguese women writers, it investigates what Portuguese literary women have to say about their culture. In addition to showing how specific works of fiction are inflected by gender and ideology, Sadlier also presents a brief historical account of feminism in Portugal. The only book of its kind in the field, The Question of How: Women Writers and the New Portuguese Literature will be of interest to both students and specialists of Hispanic literature, West European studies, Women's studies, literary theory, and criticism.

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.

"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.

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.

"This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha's own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents--especially mothers--who raise them." -Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race and Mediocre Beautifully written and deeply personal, this book follows the struggles and triumphs of one single, immigrant mother of color to raise an American feminist son. From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, the author offers an empowering, imperfect feminism, brimming with honest insight and actionable advice. Informed by Jha's work as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, other parents and boys--and through powerful stories from her own life--How to Raise a Feminist Son shows us all how to be better feminists and better teachers of the next generation of men in this electrifying tour de force. Includes chapter takeaways, and an annotated bibliography of reading and watching recommendations for adults and children. "A beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family." -Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists explores representations of monstrous women in mid-Victorian literature, tracing anxious male responses to the feminist movement of the era. It argues that Victorian patriarchy was a fluid theory and set of practices through which Victorian men attempted unsuccessfully to fix gender definitions and their own positions of power. In Victorian novels written by men, the thorough instability of contemporary conceptions of both masculinity and femininity is revealed, as an entire society struggled with new forms of self-awareness and new threats to traditional social structures and systems of belief.

Addressing the contradictions surrounding modern-day femininity and its complicated relationship with feminism and postfeminism, this book examines a range of popular female and feminist icons and paradigms. It offers an innovative and forward-looking perspective on femininity and the modern female self.

This book combines the insights of enlightenment thinking and feminist theory to explore the significance of love in modern philosophy. The author argues for the importance of emotion in general, and love in particular, to moral and political philosophy, pointing out that some of the central philosophers of the enlightment were committed to a moralized conception of love. However, she believes that feminism's insights arise not from its attribution of special and distinctive qualities to women, but from its recognition of human vulernability.

In this collection, continental and diasporan African women interrogate the concept "sacred text" and analyze ways oral and written religious "texts" intersect with violence against African-descended women and girls. While the sanctioned idea of a sacred text is written literature, this project interrupts that conception by drawing attention to speech and other embodied practices that have sacral authority within the social imaginary. As a volume focused on religion and violence, essays in this collection analyze religions' authorization of violence against women and girls; contest the legitimacy of some religious "texts"; and affirm other writing, especially memoir, as redemptive. Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood arises from three years of conversation of continental and diasporan women, most recently continued in the July 6-10, 2014 Consultation of African and African Disaporan Women in Religion and Theology and privileges experiences and contexts of continental and diasporan African women and girls. Interlocutors include African traditionalists, Christian Protestants and Catholics, Muslims, and women embodying hybrid practices of these and other traditions.

***NEW EDITION WITH BONUS CHAPTER*** Bringing you the record-breaking, bestselling Women Don't Owe You Pretty as a black and white modern classic. Women Don't Owe You Pretty is for anyone who wants to challenge the out-dated narratives supplied to us by the patriarchy. It will help you to embrace feminism in all its messy glory, explain that you are the love of your own life, and remind you that you owe men nothing, least of all pretty. This small edition includes a brand new chapter on "Why being heartbroken doesn't make you a shit feminist". Be prepared to heal. 'An incredible mouthpiece for modern intersectional feminism.' - Glamour 'A fearless book.' - Cosmopolitan 'A hugely influential young woman.' - Woman's Hour 'Rallying, radical and pitched perfectly for her generation.' - Evening Standard *OUT NOW Florence Given's DEBUT NOVEL, GIRLCRUSH *

Over the last thirty years, feminist, postcolonial and queer theorists have interrogated the ways in which sexuality is conceptualized and constructed, specifically with the intention of deconstructing essentialist notions of sexuality and identity formation. Yet, while recent theoretical interventions have re-situated sexuality as a historical and social category--allowing us to see how ideas about sexuality are linked to forms of power and other hegemonic categories of identity and subjectivity like class, race, gender and nationality--sexuality remains a contentious subject. In critically examining the plural representations of sexuality in contemporary literature, this book has a distinctly global emphasis, containing essays that interrogate sexuality in the work of not only a number of mainstream American and British writers but also less well-known writers from New Zealand and Canada. All of the chapters owe primary intellectual and theoretical debts to three broad and overlapping domains of critical scholarship and practice: feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. As the first critical collection of essays to consider the representation of sexuality across such a wide variety of contemporary writing, Sexuality and Contemporary Literature analytically foregrounds insights into the historical and current arrangements of sexuality that contemporary literature provides, while also inviting the reader to imagine other possibilities for the future that literary texts open up. Sexuality and Contemporary Literature is an important book for literary and cultural studies collections.

'A crucial book for feminists, for sociology and the new "political anthropological historical school". It informs us how we are differently "situated" in and through social relations, which texts and images mediate, organise and construct.' Philip Corrigan, Professor of Applied Sociology, Exeter University Dorothy E. Smith is Professor of Sociology in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. She is the author of The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology.