Originally published in 1990. A common complaint of philosophers, and men in general, has been that women are illogical. On the other hand, rationality, defined as the ability to follow logical argument, is often claimed to be a defining characteristic of man. Andrea Nye undermines assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independent of concrete human relations, logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, imperial administrators, church officials, or scientists. She relates logical techniques, such as logical division, syllogisms, and truth functions, to ways in which those with power speak to and about those subject to them. She shows, in the specific historical settings of Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, medieval Europe, and Germany between the World Wars, how logicians reworked language so that dialogue and reciprocity are impossible and one speaker is forced to accept the words of another. In the personal, as well as confrontative style of her readings, Nye points the way to another power in the words of women that might break into and challenge rational discourses that have structured Western thought and practice.

This creative and original book develops a framework for situated writing as theory and method, and presents a trilogy of untimely academic novellas as exemplars of the uses of situated writing. It is an inter- and trans-disciplinary book in which a diversity of forms are used to create a set of interwoven novellas, inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, along with narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography. The book makes use of a politics of location, situated knowledges, diffraction, and intersectionality theories to promote situated writing as a theory and method for exploring the complexity of social life through gender, whiteness, class, and spatial location. It addresses writing as an inter- and trans-disciplinary form of scholarship in its own right, with emancipatory potential, emphasising the role of writing in shaping creative, critical, and reflexive approaches to research, education, and professional practice. It is useful for researchers, teachers, postgraduate and PhD students in feminist and intersectionality studies, narrative studies, and pursuing interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, design, and the arts to inspire a theory and method for situated writing. Read the first issue (December 2019) of Reading Writing Quarterly, where Mona Livholts reads Helene Frichot and Helene Frichot reads Mona Livholts: https://site-writing.co.uk/rw/december-2019/

How can we promote people-centered governance in Africa? Cell phones/ information and communications technology (ICT) are shown to be linked to neoliberal understandings of more democratic governance structures, defined by the Worldwide Governance Indicators as: the rule of law, corruption-control, regulation quality, government effectiveness, political stability/no violence, and voice and accountability. However, these indicators fall short: they do note emphasize gender equity or pro-poor policies. Writing from an African feminist scholar-activist perspective, Assata Zerai emphasizes the voices of women in two ways: (1) she examines how women's access to ICT makes a difference to the success of people-centered governance structures; and (2) she demonstrates how African women's scholarship, too often marginalized, must be used to expand and redefine the goals and indicators of democratice governance in African countries. Challenging the status quo that praises the contributions of cell phones to the diffusion of knowledge and resultant better governance in Africa, this book is an important read for scholars of politics and technology, gender and politics, and African Studies.

Interest in sexual threesomes is significant, but how much do we really know about them? Why do people engage in them? What influences people's interest? And what are the longer term ramifications of a threesome? This book explores these questions and more; contextualising the findings in relation to wider norms of gender, sexual behaviour, and relationships. Drawing upon more than 50 interviews and 200+ qualitative surveys this book offers a rich and in-depth analysis of contemporary threesome behaviours. The findings suggest that threesomes are a complex and multi-faceted sexual behaviour. A behaviour which simultaneously resists and maintains norms of monogamy, serves important roles and functions for individuals and relationships, and is both highly desirable but potentially risky. This book would appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as postdoctoral scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology, and sexology. In particular, this book is essential reading for those interested in threesomes, consensual non-monogamies, and contemporary norms of sexual behaviour.

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

Gendered processes of globalisation, transnationalisation and urbanisation are increasing local and global inequalities and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The global finance industry plays a key role in these processes, directing its operations from local command points in global cities such as London. Drawing on empirical data collected after the 2008 financial crisis - in depth interviews with male City of London bankers who are also fathers, in depth interviews with the bankers' wives, observational data of work and family spaces, and banks' promotional online material -this book explores the day-to-day individual and institutional social practices of wealthy City bankers and banks. The book's analysis offers insight into how the spaces of work and home are integrally linked in ways that mutually shape, support and sustain the gendered dominance of the industry and its highly paid workers. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the fields of gender studies, critical studies of men and masculinities, urban and metropolitan studies, sociology, studies of globalisation and transnationalisation, anthropology, cultural studies and business management. It will also be interesting for those concerned about the role of the finance industry and neoliberal capitalist ideologies, values and practices in ever-widening local and global inequalities.

Divided into 15 chapters, this book provides the reader with an insight into certain representations of mothers and motherhood in history and today's societies in some areas of the world, notably in Britain and Asia. Key facts about the history of motherhood are presented, together with the use of very recent notions and phrases portraying 'good' and 'bad' mothers. An analysis of the concepts of naming and blaming, along with regret with respect to mothers in 21st century societies, provides food for thought. Other issues addressed are varied and numerous: the politics of early intervention, feminist critique, mothers with disabilities and mothers of disabled children, incarcerated mothers, surrogate mothers, teenage mothers, lesbian mothers, and mothering in Eastern Asia, namely in China, Japan, and Korea. Interestingly, both visual arts and literature play a crucial role in this analysis. The publication will appeal to students, academics, researchers, and the general public interested in and seeking to comprehend the shifts that have occurred over time in connection with the vast and inexhaustible subject of motherhood and mothers - a private and public matter. Readers are also provided with a rich reference section dealing with the latest publications on the issues tackled by prominent academics and researchers in human geography, women's studies, sociology, gender studies, contemporary history, and the arts.

This book aims to begin an eco-centered, eco-feminist informed discussion about the ways in which our relationship to "nature" is bound up with gender, patriarchy, and violence. Ecofeminist scholars study the interconnections between gendered relationships of domination among humans, between humans, and between humans, nonhumans, and the earth. It is in this ideological and structural tangle between humans and the environment that a deeper understanding of gender violence is possible. Ecofeminism offers analytical possibilities for understanding a "logic of domination" which sustain a whole host of problems, including the interrelated oppressions of gender violence and exploitation of the more-than-human-life world. In this book, Gwen Hunnicutt brings into dialog ecofeminism and gender violence. Ideological components, such as speciesism and the belief that the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants are ours to exploit, inform a host of other social practices, including interpersonal violence. A portion of this book is devoted to exploring the ways in which patriarchy is foregrounded by another hierarchy-uman domination over "nature". Thus, gender violence stems from a logic of domination that is built on the domination of nature and the domination of the Other "as nature". As this blueprint of oppression repeats itself where there are vectors of difference, the chapters ultimately connect these oppressions by showing the inextricable bind of violence against humans and the more-than-human-life world. This book will serve as a resource for scholars, activists, and students in sociology, gender violence and interdisciplinary violence studies, critical animal studies, environmental studies, and feminist and ecofeminist studies.

This book explores the intersubjective nature of disgust, the fascination that often accompanies it-along with repulsion-and the ethical implications of the experience. With attention to what emotions do rather than what they necessarily are, it examines the ways in which disgust works to create structures of meaning about selfhood, interpersonal relationships, and the worlds we inhabit. Offering a critique of existing approaches to disgust, the author advances a feminist intersubjective perspective, drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin to understand the relational aspects of disgust encounters. Thus, the focus is not on defining disgust definitively, nor debating what objects invoke disgust, nor on whether it is a universal experience, but on the effects of disgust once invoked, what the experience does and the impact it has. Through a case study of incarceration and death by self-inflicted strangulation-a death that was later ruled a homicide-this volume sheds light on the nature of the ethical demands of disgust and its nature as an active struggle for recognition. As such, A Politics of Disgust will appeal to scholars of gender studies, social theory and philosophy with interests in the emotions and intersubjectivity.

This book investigates competing modes of thought about gender security and aims to understand the policy implications of personal-political imaginations. The work draws upon extensive research conducted by the author in Serbia to develop a comprehensive picture of how feminist and women's organising relates to the broader national and international contexts surrounding gender security. Through an innovative analytical framework of personal-political imaginations, the book explores the role that memories, perceptions and hopes about conflict and post-conflict have upon the logics of gender security. It investigates how contrasting and competing modes of thought about 'gender security' are made, paying attention to how the dynamics of gender politics in Serbia shape the security discourse and narratives of activists. The volume explores in detail how feminist and women's organisations have responded to UNSCR 1325 by analysing two policy debates and campaigns that seek to 'achieve' its goals and gender security in Serbia: (1) feminist antimilitarism and (2) connecting domestic violence to the abuse of small arms and light weapons. Ultimately, the book argues that the configuration of gender security discourse is intimately linked to personal-political imaginations of conflict and post-conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, conflict studies, critical security studies, European politics and IR in general.

The Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a particular set of economic and social circumstances in which women were unequally treated in the home, the workplace and in culture and wider society. As part of the WLM, women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society, making their concerns apparent through consciousness-raising and activism. This important time in women's history is revisited in this collection, which looks afresh at the diversity of the movement and the ways in which feminism of the time might be reconsidered and historicised. The contributions here cover a range of important issues, including feminist art, local activism, class distinction, racial politics, perceptions of motherhood, girls' education, feminist print cultures, the recovery of feminist histories and feminist heritage, and they span personal and political concerns in Britain, Canada and the United States. Each contributor considers the impact of the WLM in a different context, reflecting the variety of issues faced by women and helping us to understand the problems of the second wave. This book broadens our understanding of the impact and the implication of the WLM, explores the dynamism of women's activism and radicalism, and acknowledges the significance of this movement to ongoing contemporary feminisms. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

This book develops the concept of feminist technoecologies as a theoretical and methodological tool for examining the co-constitutive relation between technology and ecology, which have typically been considered as distinct objects of studies. In underscoring how their dynamic relationality troubles the location of agency, this book challenges the idea that technology, as the marker of the innovative capacity of the human, either corrupts or saves ecology. The contributions to the volume present feminist approaches that contextualise and historicize such issues as multi-species survival, border control regimes, solar power, bioart, artificial intelligence and air pollution. They insist on the centrality of corporeality, affects, ethics and vulnerability in the materialisation of technoecological relations, and call into question the exceptional status of the figure of (hu)Man. Together they offer critical and creative tools or modes of inquiry for imagining alternative modalities of practicing care and thinking environmental sustainability. As a creative contribution to the growing literature on new configurations of bodies, technologies and environments against the backdrop of ecological degradation, digital technologization, and precarity in late capitalism, Feminist Technoecologies extends the interchanges between feminist materialisms, environmental humanities and feminist technosciences studies, and will be a resource for all those interested in these fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.

This volume examines different types of women's creative writing in support of the demand for the parliamentary vote, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, novels, and drama. The women's suffrage movement became far more visible in the Edwardian period. Large demonstrations and militant actions such as destruction of property were widely reported in the press and reached a wide audience. Eager to get their message across, suffrage campaigners not only took collective action but also used women's creative talents-whether as artists, musicians, or writers-to win hearts and minds for the cause. Through a close reading of contemporary texts, the chapters in this book reveal the diverse nature of the suffrage movement and its ideas, and the complex relationship between the personal and the political. The contributors also highlight the significance of women's writing as a means to advance the suffrage cause and as a key element of suffrage propaganda. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women's agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency. By analysing Australian women's literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women's writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia's diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.

Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm identifies religious and secular feminism's common critical moment as that of idol-breaking. It reads the women's liberation movement as founded upon a philosophically and emotionally risky attempt to liberate women's consciousness from a three-fold cognitive captivity to the self-idolizing god called 'Man'; the 'God' who is a projection of his power, and the idol of the feminine called 'Woman' that the god-called-God created for 'Man'. Examining a period of feminist theory, theology, and culture from about 1965 to 2010, this book shows that secular, as well as Christian, Jewish, and post-Christian feminists drew on ancient and modern tropes of redemption from slavery to idols or false ideas as a means of overcoming the alienation of women's being from their own becoming. With an understanding of feminist theology as a pivotal contribution to the feminist criticism of culture, this original book also examines idoloclasm in feminist visual art, literature, direct action, and theory, not least that of the sexual politics of romantic love, the diet and beauty industry, sex robots, and other phenomena whose idolization of women reduces them to figures of the feminine same, experienced as a de-realization or death of the self. This book demonstrates that secular and religious feminist critical engagements with the modern trauma of dehumanization were far more closely related than is often supposed. As such, it will be vital reading for scholars in theology, religious studies, gender studies, visual studies, and philosophy.

Within much contemporary feminist theory there is a tendency to forget or ignore its own historicity and consider itself as primarily oriented towards the present. This book explores the historical roots of some of feminism's central concepts and debates, examining the philosophical conditions for feminist thought and taking as its point of departure the dynamic relationship between feminist thought and the history of philosophy. With close attention to the genealogy of key concepts such as equality, sex/gender and difference, alongside discussions of contemporary gender equality policy and contextual understandings of central figures including Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir and Irigaray, The Genealogy of Modern Feminist Thinking provides an analysis of feminism from its origins in the Early Modern period to its contemporary, post-modern forms. Shedding light on feminism as a product of Modernity and establishing it as part of the canon of European intellectual development, this book thus corrects the picture of feminism as a phenomenon that lacks historical continuity, revealing a history characterized by breaks, setbacks and forgetting, in which the forgetting itself forms part of a rich genealogy. As such, it will be of interest to philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and intellectual historians alike.

The new edition of "Beauty and Misogyny "revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys' uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as it was in 2005 when the first edition of the book was published.

The United Nations concept of "harmful traditional/cultural practices" provides a useful lens for the author to advance her critique. She makes the case for including Western beauty practices within this definition, examining their role in damaging women's health, creating sexual difference and enforcing female deference.

First-wave feminists of the 1970s criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but a later argument took hold that beauty practices were no longer oppressive now that women could "choose" them. In recent years the reality of Western beauty practices has become much more bloody and severe, requiring the breaking of skin and the rearrangement or amputation of body parts. "Beauty and Misogyny" seeks to make sense of why beauty practices have not only persisted but become more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing, surgical alteration of the labia and other forms of self-mutilation. The book concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.

A new and thoroughly updated edition of this essential work will appeal to all levels of students and teachers of gender studies, cultural studies and feminist psychology, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health."

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the postcolonial and the postsocialist in feminist theorizing and practice. While postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives have been explored in feminist studies, the two analytics tend to be viewed separately. This volume brings together attempts to understand if and how postcolonial and postsocialist dimensions of the human condition - historical, existential, political, and ideological - intersect and correlate in feminist experiences, identities, and struggles. In the three sections that probe the intersections, opacities, and challenges between the two discourses, the authors put under pressure what postcolonialism and postsocialism mean for feminist scholarship and activism. The contributions address the emergence of new political and cultural formations as well as circuits of bodies and capital in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era in currently re-emerging neo-colonial and imperial conflicts. They engage with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, diasporas, indigeneity, and disability, while also developing new analytical tools such as postsocialist precarity, queer postsocialist coloniality, uneventful feminism, feminist opacity, feminist queer crip epistemologies. The collection will be of interest for postcolonial and postsocialist researchers, students of gender studies, feminist activists and scholars.

The idea that gender equality in education has been achieved is now a staple of public debate. As a result, educational policies and practices often do not deal explicitly with gender issues, such as sexual abuse, harassment or violence. Exaggeration of neoliberalism s successes in creating individual opportunity in education conceals ongoing problems and ignores the continuing need for a fair and equal education for all, regardless of gender or sexuality. In this manifesto for education, Miriam David rejects the notion that gender equality has been achieved in our age of neoliberalism. She puts the focus back onto issues such as changing patterns of women s and girls participation in education across the globe, feminist strategies for policy and legal interventions around human rights, and violence against women and children. She discusses waves of feminism linked to school-teaching and pedagogies in higher education as well as an illuminating case study of an international educational programme to challenge gender-related violence. Revealing neoliberal education to be misogyny masquerading as metrics , Miriam David argues for changes in the patriarchal rules of the game, including questioning gender norms and stereotypical binaries, and for making personal, social, health and sexuality education mainstream.

Jane Austen was one of the most adventurous thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but one would probably never guess that by reading her critics. Perhaps no canonical author in English literature has proven, until now, more resistant to theory. Tracing the political motives for this resistance, Jane Austen and Literary Theory proceeds to counteract it. The book's detailed interpretations guide readers through some of the important intellectual achievements of Austen's career-from the stunning teenage parodies "Evelyn" and "The History of England" to her most accomplished novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. While criticism has largely been content to describe the various ways Austen was a product of her time, Jane Austen and Literary Theory reveals how she anticipated the ideas of formidable literary thinkers of the twentieth century, especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Gift and exchange, speech and writing, symbol and allegory, stable irony and Romantic irony-these are just a few of the binary oppositions her dazzling texts deconstruct. Although her novels are major achievements of nineteenth-century realism, critics have hitherto underestimated their rhetorical cunning and their fascination with the materiality of language. Doing justice to Austen's language requires critical methods as ruthless as her irony, and Jane Austen and Literary Theory supplies these methods. This book will enable both her devotees and her detractors to appreciate her genius in unusual ways.

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique-often by naming and calling attention to problems-and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions-such as forming support systems-to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

How can we reimagine the relationship between academia and activism to provide new opportunities for social change? Based on an ethnography with an anti-violence feminist collective, this vibrant and vital book develops an interdisciplinary approach to activism and activist research, helping us reimagine the role of scholarship in the fight against social inequality. With its reflections on novel tools that can be utilized in the fight for social justice, this book will be a valuable resource for academics in critical management studies, sociology, gender studies, and social work as well as practitioners and policymakers across the social services sector.

'War is a man's game,' or so goes the saying. Whether this is true or not, patriarchal capitalism is certainly one of the driving forces behind war in the modern era. So can we end war with feminism? This book argues that this is possible, and is in fact already happening. Each chapter provides a solution to war using innovative examples of how feminist and queer theory and practice inform pacifist treaties, movements and methods, from the international to the domestic spheres. The contributors propose a range of solutions that include arms abolition, centring Indigenous knowledge, economic restructuring, and transforming how we 'count' civilian deaths. Ending war requires challenging complex structures, but the solutions found in this edition have risen to this challenge. By thinking beyond the violence of the capitalist patriarchy, this book makes the powerful case that the possibility of life without war is real.