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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies
Cognitive cultural theorists have rarely taken up sex, sexuality,
or gender identity. When they have done so, they have often
stressed the evolutionary sources of gender differences. In Sexual
Identities, Patrick Colm Hogan extends his pioneering work on
identity to examine the complexities of sex, the diversity of
sexuality, and the limited scope of gender. Drawing from a diverse
body of literary works, Hogan illustrates a rarely drawn
distinction between practical identity (the patterns in what one
does, thinks, and feels) and categorical identity (how one labels
oneself or is categorized by society). Building on this
distinction, he offers a nuanced reformulation of the idea of
social construction, distinguishing ideology, situational
determination, shallow socialization, and deep socialization. He
argues for a meticulous skepticism about gender differences and a
view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and highly
variable. The variability of sexuality and the near absence of
gender fixity-and the imperfect alignment of practical and
categorical identities in both cases-give rise to the social
practices that Judith Butler refers to as "regulatory regimes."
Hogan goes on to explore the cognitive and affective operation of
such regimes. Ultimately, Sexual Identities turns to sex and the
question of how to understand transgendering in a way that respects
the dignity of transgender people, without reverting to gender
essentialism.
Theorizing Women and Leadership: New Insights and Contributions
from Multiple Perspectives is the fifth volume in the Women and
Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This
cross?disciplinary series, from the International Leadership
Association, enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership
development of women around the world. The purpose of this volume
is to provide a forum for women to theorize about women's
leadership in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. Theorizing
has been a viewed as a gendered activity (Swedberg, 2014), and this
series of chapters seeks to upend that imbalance. The chapters are
written by women who represent multiple disciplines, cultures,
races, and subject positions. The diversity extends into research
paradigm and method, and the chapters combine to illuminate the
multiple ways of knowing about and being a woman leader.
Twenty?first century leadership scholars acknowledge the importance
of context, and many are considering post?heroic leadership models
based on relationships rather than traits. This volume contributes
to this discussion by offering a diverse array of perspectives and
ways of knowing about leadership and leading. The purpose of the
volume is to provide readers with not only interesting new ideas
about women and leadership, but also to highlight the diverse
epistemologies that can contribute to theorizing about women
leaders. Some chapters represent typical social scientific
practices and processes, while others represent newer knowledge
forms and ways of knowing. The volume contributors adopt various
epistemological positions, ranging from objective researcher to
embedded co?participant. The chapters link their new findings to
existing empirical or conceptual work and illustrate how the
findings extend, amend, contradict, or confirm existing research.
The diversity of the chapters is one of the volume's strengths
because it illuminates the multiple ways that leadership theory for
women can be advanced. Typically, research based on a realist
perspective is more valued in the academy. This perspective has
indeed generated robust information about leadership in general and
women's leadership in particular. However, readers of this volume
are offered an opportunity to explore multiple ways of knowing,
different ways of researching, and are invited to de?center
researcher objectivity. The authors of the chapters offer
conceptual and empirical findings, illuminate multiple and
alternative research practices, and in the end suggest future
directions for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed?methods
research.
To understand masculine and feminine social and political history
in the second half of the 20th century, one must first understand
the lexical history of the term gender, which did not become an
attribute of human beings until 1955 when John Money introduced the
concept of gender role to refer to the masculine or feminine
presentation of individuals whose genital organs, by reason of
birth defect, were anatomically neither completely male or
completely female, but hermaphroditic. In this book, Money explores
the history of gender differentiation and its impact on
contemporary, postmodern social constructionist explanations of
male and female. He argues that the nature vs nurture dichotomy
should be abandoned in favour of a paradigm of nature/critical
period/nurture. The book further discusses how some gender
differences are phylogenetically shared by all people and others
are ontologically unique to an individual.
From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.
This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist
sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne nait pas femme:
on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint that galvanizes feminist
thinking and action in multiple dimensions. Since its publication,
the sentence has inspired feminist thinking and action in many
different cultural and linguistic contexts. Two entangled
controversies emerge in the life of this sentence: a controversy
over the practice of translation and a controversy over the nature
and status of sexual difference. Variously translated into English
as "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman" (Parshley, 1953),
"one is not born but rather becomes woman" (Borde and
Malovany-Chevallier, 2010), and "women are made, not born" (in
popular parlance), the conflict over the translation crystallizes
the feminist debate over the possibilities and limitations of
social construction as a theory of sexual difference. When Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (contributors to this
volume), translated Le Deuxieme Sexe into English in 2010, their
decision to alter the translation of the famous sentence by
omitting the "a" ignited debate that has not yet exhausted itself.
The controversy over the English translation has opened a
conversation about translation practices and their relation to
meaning more generally, and broadens, in this volume, into an
examination of the life of Beauvoir's key sentence in other
languages and political and cultural contexts as well. The
philosophers, translators, literary scholars and historian who
author these essays take decidedly different positions on the
meaning of the sentence in French, and thus on its correct
translation in a variety of languages-but also on the meaning and
salience of the question of sexual difference as it travels between
languages, cultures, and political worlds.
"I will always be somebody." This assertion, a startling one from a
nineteenth-century woman, drove the life of Dr. Mary Edwards
Walker, the only American woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor.
President Andrew Johnson issued the award in 1865 in recognition of
the incomparable medical service Walker rendered during the Civil
War. Yet few people today know anything about the woman so
well-known--even notorious--in her own lifetime. Theresa Kaminski
shares a different way of looking at the Civil War, through the
eyes of a woman confident she could make a contribution equal to
that of any man. She takes readers into the political cauldron of
the nation's capital in wartime, where Walker was a familiar if
notorious figure. Mary Walker's relentless pursuit of gender and
racial equality is key to understanding her commitment to a Union
victory in the Civil War. Her role in the women's suffrage movement
became controversial and the US Army stripped Walker of her medal,
only to have the medal reinstated posthumously in 1977.
Between 1922 and 1996, over 10,000 girls and women were imprisoned
in Magdalene Laundries, including those considered 'promiscuous', a
burden to their families or the state, those who had been sexually
abused or raised in the care of the Church and State, and unmarried
mothers. These girls and women were subjected to forced labour as
well as psychological and physical maltreatment. Using the Irish
State's own report into the Magdalene institutions, as well as
testimonies from survivors and independent witnesses, this book
gives a detailed account of life behind the high walls of Ireland's
Magdalene institutions. The book offers an overview of the social,
cultural and political contexts of institutional survivor activism,
the Irish State's response culminating in the McAleese Report, and
the formation of the Justice for Magdalenes campaign, a
volunteer-run survivor advocacy group. Ireland and the Magdalene
Laundries documents the ongoing work carried out by the Justice for
Magdalenes group in advancing public knowledge and research into
Magdalene Laundries, and how the Irish State continues to evade its
responsibilities not just to survivors of the Magdalenes but also
in providing a truthful account of what happened. Drawing from a
variety of primary sources, this book reveals the fundamental flaws
in the state's investigation and how the treatment of the burials,
exhumation and cremation of former Magdalene women remains a deeply
troubling issue today, emblematic of the system of torture and
studious official neglect in which the Magdalene women lived their
lives. The Authors are donating all royalties in the name of the
women who were held in the Magdalenes to EPIC (Empowering People in
Care).
For much of the 20th century, books for children encouraged girls
to be weak, submissive, and fearful. This book discusses such
traits, both blatantly and subtly reinforced, in many of the most
popular works of the period. Quoting a wide variety of passages,
O'Keefe illustrates the typical behaviour of fictional girls - many
of whom were passive and immobile while others were actually
invalids. They all engaged in approved girlish activities: deferred
to elders, observed the priorities, and, in the end, accepted
conventional suitors. Even feisty tomboys, like Jo in Little Women,
eventually gave up on their dreams and their independence. The
discussion is interlaced with moments from the author's own
childhood that suggest how her developing self-interacted with
these stories. She and her contemporaries, trying to reconcile
their conservative reading with the changing world around them,
learned ambivalence rather than confidence. Good Girl Messages also
includes a discussion of books read by boys, who were depicted as
purposeful, daring, and dominating.
Contributions by Susan Eleuterio, Andrea Glass, Rachelle Hope
Saltzman, Jack Santino, Patricia E. Sawin, and Adam Zolkover. The
2016 US presidential campaign and its aftermath provoked an array
of protests notable for their use of humor, puns, memes, and
graphic language. During the campaign, a video surfaced of
then-candidate Donald Trump's lewd use of the word "pussy"; in
response, many women have made the issue and the term central to
the public debate about women's bodies and their political, social,
and economic rights. Focusing on the women-centred aspects of the
protests that started with the 2017 Women's March, Pussy Hats,
Politics, and Public Protest deals with the very public nature of
that surprising, grassroots spectacle and explores the relationship
between the personal and the political in the protests.
Contributors to this edited collection use a folkloristic lens to
engage with the signs, memes, handmade pussy hats, and other items
of material culture that proliferated during the march and in
subsequent public protests. Contributors explore how this march and
others throughout history have employed the social critique
functions and features of carnival to stage public protests; how
different generations interacted and acted in the march; how
perspectives on inclusion and citizenship influenced and motivated
participation; how women-owned businesses and their dedicated
patrons interacted with the election, the march, and subsequent
protests; how popular belief affects actions and reactions,
regardless of some objective notion of truth; and how traditionally
female crafts and gifting behaviour strengthened and united those
involved in the march.
This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods
used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope
which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film,
and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of
motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the
structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and
sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural,
media, and gender studies address the complications of representing
agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts
complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of
privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and
off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers
perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the
motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while
engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed
both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access,
hierarchy, and power.
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