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.

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.

In Leaning Out, respected journalist Kristine Ziwica maps a decade of stasis on the gender equality front in Australia, and why the pandemic has led to a breakthrough. As the historic 2020 Women's March attests, a generation of younger women are speaking truth to power and changing the way we think of women in the workplace. This is the third book in The Crikey Read series from Crikey and Hardie Grant Books. For ten years Australian women have been sold a dazzling promise: through sheer 'will' and individual self-empowerment they could overcome decades of gender inequality in the workplace. The hard, structural work didn't need to be done; all the solutions could be individual. Yet leaning in, power-posing and speaking up (and being spoken over) at the boardroom table have made very little difference for the great majority of women, still underpaid and overworked compared to their male colleagues. The COVID-19 pandemic has shockingly revealed the fragile foundations of women's working lives. It's also given us a rare opportunity for a reimagining. But Australian women are still being told to 'Lean In' at precisely the moment when so many are 'leaning out'. With the majority of all jobs lost in the pandemic being held by women, and successive governments unable or unwilling to address the 'gender issue', we are at crisis point. Leaning Out is a manifesto for what we can - and should - do with this moment. From Crikey and Hardie Grant Books, The Crikey Read is a series that brings an unflinching and truly independent eye to the issues of the day in Australia and the world.

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.

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.

Although Hegel and feminism seem an unlikely couple, Hegelian philosophy played a prominent part in the thinking of groundbreaking feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray. This book offers a new generation of feminist readings of Hegel from leading scholars in the both fields. Through close readings and innovative arguments, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate on gender and provides insight into philosophical method.

The eight essays contained in Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture explore the portrayal of women and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. The essays examine visual, print, and performance media stand-up comedy, movies, television, and a blockbuster trilogy of novel. These philosophical feminist analyses of popular culture consider the possibilities, both positive and negative, that popular culture presents for articulating the structure of the social and cultural practices in which gender matters, and for changing these practices if and when they follow from, lead to, or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of gender. The essays bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era."

Issues surrounding precarity, debility and vulnerability are now of central concern to philosophers as we try and navigate an increasingly uncertain world. Matthew R. McLennan delves into these subjects enthusiastically and sensitively, presenting a vision of the discipline of philosophy which is grounded in real, lived experience. Developing an invigorating, if at times painful, sense of the finitude and fragility of human life, Philosophy and Vulnerability provocatively marshals three disciplinary "nonphilosophers" to make its argument: French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat, journalist and masterful cultural commentator Joan Didion and feminist poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. Through this encounter, this book suggests ways in which rigorous attention to difference and diversity must nourish a militant philosophical universalism in the future.

It is not easy. Having a dream, having talent and being faced with a world that wants you to have neither – it is not easy.

This is not an easy story. This is a book about difficult odds, about cruelty, about broken families and addiction. This is also a story about hope. This is a tale of bravery and the undefeatability of the spirit of South African women. This is a story about football, but it is a story about so much more. This is a tale about the fearless women who carry the sport on their back, told through the eyes of the best player on the African continent.

This is the story of a little girl who rose out of the tough streets of Mohlakeng and went on to become a champion of the world.

This timely book provides new insights into debates around the relationship between women and film by drawing on the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray. Arguing that female-directed cinema provides new ways to explore ideas of representation and spectatorship, it also examines the importance of contexts of production, direction and reception.

This impressive and original study is one of the first books to combine mainstream sociology with feminism in exploring the subject of the professions and power. This is an important addition to the corpus of feminist scholarship... It provides fresh insights into the way in which male power has been used to limit the employment aspirations of women in the middle classes. - Rosemary Crompton, University of Kent

'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.

Feminist concern with difference has rarely extended to rurality even if it is now widely recognized that experiences of inequality depend on intersections of several identities in each individual life. This lack of concern may reflect the urban background of the majority of feminist academics or at least their urban positionality once in the academy. It may equivalently be that feminists have been influenced by stereotypes of rural women as traditional and reactionary, and thus seen them as unlikely exponents of gender equality, and an unfruitful focus for scholarly energies. Perhaps the problem is a broader one, that is, reflective of the much documented, but still apparent unwillingness of many feminists to recognize and address difference in any of its manifestations. Regardless, even with the recent interest in intersectionality which has necessarily renewed and reenergized debates in feminism about diversity and inclusion, the question of how women are differently positioned because of their non-metropolitan location has remained largely overlooked.

This work provides a broad survey of the development of female insurgency in France between 1789 and 1871, placing particular emphasis on the conflicts of 1830-1851. The author demonstrates that a tradition of women's protest evolved from the 1789 Revolution, assuming particular forms associated with the exclusion of females from political and civil rights, and inviting both praise and vilification. The conclusions challenge the view that in 19th-century France, women retreated altogether from popular movements.

Yeltsin is certainly not the Sakharov of the Democratic Movement. Russian people sarcastically call his burning the Parliament an October Revolution of 1993. In "Women's Glasnost vs. Naglost "we finally hear the voices of the Russian women on what it means to be female and Russian in the tumultuous climate that is modern Russia. The founder of the Russian women's movement, Tatyana Mamonova was the first Russian woman exiled from the Soviet Union for publishing the underground samizdat, Woman and Russia. Now lauded as the Simone de Beauvoir of Russia, Mamonova has interviewed 17 Russian women on the subject of the C.A.S. as it relates to glasnost. Women from all walks of life are asked about changes with respect to their roles and expectations as women. Artists, professionals, dissidents, lesbians, doctors, writers, and civil servants tell their stories in candid terms showing that there is still a long road ahead. Revisions and elaborations of speeches delivered on Mamonova's American tours, poetry in her own hand, and line drawings in her own eloquent and prolific style compliment her essays and the women's interviews.

The history of the housewife is a complicated and uneasy narrative, rife with contradictions, tensions, and unanswered questions. In response to this, Sentenced to Everyday Life marks an important cross-generational moment in feminism. Challenging our previous understandings of what constitutes the housewife figure, this book tugs at a critical issue still unresolved in the contemporary world: what is the relationship between women and the home? And why are women so reluctant to call themselves housewives? Drawing on research and evidence surrounding the housewife figure of the 1940s and 1950s, Johnson and Lloyd address the question of why the housewife has been such a problematic figure in feminist debates since World War II. Starting with an exploration of why the housewife of the 1940s became associated with drudgery, this book covers such topics as the ways in which magazines and advertising attempted to articulate an innate connection between women and the domestic sphere, while later films of the 1950s explored the constantly shifting boundaries between social, family and individual desires and constraints for women in the home. Johnson and Lloyd also examine how the home has been a site of boredom, and what happens to the balance between work and family in the modern world. In moving into contemporary debates, the authors explore the uneasy tension between the construction of the modern self and women's efforts to transcend the domestic sphere. By situating their examination in a still unresolved contemporary topic, Johnson and Lloyd offer us both a backward glance and a forward-looking perspective into domesticity and the modern self.

Originally published in English in 1927, this study discusses the physical differences between men and women and how this affected the views of men and women of society. With all known information at the time, the author also details perceived mental differences between the sexes and finishes with a brief cultural history of women's place in society. This title will be of interest to students of Gender Studies and History.

This book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of Education, Sociology, and Gender Studies.

- by veteran Routledge author whose books always sell well - first book in our Jungian film and media studies 'sub-list' that examines anything as contemporary as Netflix

This is a new edition of Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking collection of essays, originally published in 1989. in an extensive introduction to this second edition, Mulvey looks back at the historical and personal contests for her famous article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, "and reassesses her theories in the light of new technologies.

Part of a fully indexed 20-volume collection which gathers together significant research contributions on the social, religious and political history of women in the United States, from colonial times to the 1990s.

This book analyzes the literary representation of Indigenous women in Latin American letters from colonization to the twentieth century, arguing that contemporary theorization of Indigenous feminism deconstructs denigratory imagery and offers a (re)signification, (re)semantization and reinvigoration of what it means to be an Indigenous woman.

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Visit Paula Kamen's website at http: //www.paulakamen.com

"It's about time! Read this book."
"--Shere Hite, The Hite Report"

"With intelligence and flair, Gen-X feminist, journalist and playwright Kamen (Feminist Fatale) presents an exhaustive study of the sexual mores of the women in her generation. . . . Critical yet nonjudgmental, Kamen's lively book is a welcome primer on contemporary sexual ethics. . . . It's sure to be a hit among feminists of all ages even while it raises eyebrows in other camps."
"--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"

"a]at times startling and at the very least amusinga]reading it is an education. And now we know at least some of what educated women stand to gain."
"--The New York Times Book Review"

"A refreshing surveya]Offers lucid analyses of the changing content and understanding of sex."
"-- The Chicago Tribune"

"At last, the torch has been passed! Paula Kamen follows women's struggle for sexual pleasure and self-affirmation into a new generation - and finds it healthier and more vibrant than ever. Young women will be fascinated by Her Way. Older ones will be amazed."
"--Barbara Ehrenreich"

"At last, a book about young women's sexual behavior that's actually written by a young woman! Paula Kamen documents women's sexual truths without judgment and-more important-without all the wrongheaded, double-standard-laden assumptions that all too often plague writing on this topic. Kamen brings the focus back where it should be: on women's own views, rather than others' views of them."
"--Lisa Miya-Jervis, Bitch Magazine"

"A bold new look at female sexuality in America today. Based onyears of meticulous research, Paula Kamen has produced a fascinating, important study of how young women are redefining their roles and relationships in a post-boomer world."
"--Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking"

"Lively and entertaining, honoring the intimate voices of a diversity of women, Her Way is an authoritative study of our long slow journey toward sexual autonomy. Kamen is a savvy third wave feminist who has done her homework. The book is a link between generations, and a major stepping stone toward fuller liberation. This is feminism for the 21st century!"
"--Barbara Seaman, coeditor of For Women Only: Our Guide to Health Empowerment"

"Intellectual, political, and compassionate, Her Way shows that the freedom to live and love by our own standards-with men on our good side-is the way toward the social change that, truly, begins in our social lives."
"--Lynn Harris, author of Breakup Girl to the Rescue! A Superhero's Guide to Love, and Lack Thereof"

"Gives women cause to celebrate! Her Way shows how, for perhaps the first time in history, a generation of young women is truly defining sex on its own terms. Her nuanced analysis of this quiet but undeniable trend is optimistic while not shying away from the problems that remain, including the inertia of a mainstream popular culture that insists on portraying women as sexy rather than as sexual beings in their own right."
"--Lisa Douglass, coauthor of Are We Having Fun Yet? The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Sex"

"Chronicles the complex ways young women understand and experience sexuality today. In this collection, Kamen draws on interviews, reports, and studies to weave an analysis of how Gen-X womendefine and adopt sex roles and gendered responses to an increasingly sexualized world. . . . Kamen concludes, rather convincingly, that young women are finally beginning to make their own rules, instead of blindly obeying those made by others and, as a result, are leading more fulfilling lives."
"--MS. MAGAZINE"

"If women's sexual mores become more like men's, is that progress? Paula Kamen seems to think so, based on HER WAY. . . . Kamen backs her assertions with a panoramic breadth of scholarship-pretty much every major piece of sex research for the last hundred years shows up in HER WAY, including some fascinating surveys of women born in the nineteenth century."
"--NERVE"

"Lively and entertaining, honoring the intimate voices of a diversity of women, Her Way is an authoritative study of our long slow journey toward sexual autonomy. Kamen is a savvy third wave feminist who has done her homework. The book is a link between generations, and a major stepping stone toward fuller liberation. This is feminism for the 21st century!"
--Barbara Seaman, Co-editor of "For Women Only: Our Guide to Health Empowerment"

"The next time you're having an argument with some asshole over the fact that women can have just as high a sex drive and the same ability to know their desires as men, just pull out this book. . . . It's a great book to help you get an overall feeling for the sexual attitudes of chicks these days. . . . a must-have for any feminist home."
"--BUST"

Three decades after the Sexual Revolution, women's power and status have begun to match men's, and women are finally making the rules in order to experience a more radical and truer form of liberation.

Her Waydemonstrates how and why 20- and 30-something women have evolved to act and think more like men sexually, while also creating their own distinct sexual patterns and appetites. Today's young women are now the leaders of an unreported but sweeping "Sexual Evolution," in which women take control of sex and redefine it from their perspective. In other words, do it "her way."

Paula Kamen characterizes this Sexual Evolution according to two major developments that are setting sexual patterns for future generations of women: young women's sexual profiles are now remarkably similar to those of men, in terms of age of first intercourse, and numbers of sex partners and casual encounters. They also feel less guilt or shame about their behavior, from premarital sex to having a child out of marriage to coming out of the closet to cohabiting.

Yet young women are not merely imitating men, but forging their own distinct sexual perspectives and asserting their own needs. In addition to discovering the pleasures of sex, young women are also exploring the dilemmas, challenging male-defined sexual scripts, and changing what actually goes on in bed.

Based on more than one hundred lively, unfiltered and in-depth interviews with women across the country, Her Way cuts through the sensationalism and speculation of popular discussions about young women and sex. Kamen reports the real story of today's enhanced sexual expectations and choices.

This study of feminism, equity and change in the academy is based on interviews with 40 feminist academics and students in Britain, Sweden and Greece. The research attempts to decode and disentangle gendered message systems and the matrix of power relations in the academy. It consists of feminist readings of the micro processes of everyday practices. Change is interrogated in relation to feminist pedagogy, equity, organizational culture, policies and discourses of new right reform, mass expansion and new managerialism. This work is intended for departments of sociology, women's studies, education, organization studies, management studies, equal opportunities, and employment studies.