"The Concise Companion to Feminist Theory" introduces readers to the broad scope of feminist theory over the last 35 years.
Introduces readers to the broad scope of feminist theory over the past 35 years.
Guides students along the cutting edge of current feminist theory.
Suitable for students and scholars of all fields touched by feminist thought.
Covers an exceptionally broad range of disciplines, discourses and feminist positions.
Organised around concepts rather than schools of feminism.

Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France analyzes pairs of women writing in French. Through examining pairs of writers, ranging from Colette and Anne de Pene to Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar, Katharine Ann Jensen assesses how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women's relationships, the author combines close readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.

While the world often categorizes women in reductive false binaries—careerist versus mother, feminine versus fierce—romance novels, a unique form of the love story, offer an imaginative space of mingled alternatives for a heroine on her journey to selfhood. In Creating Identity, Jayashree Kamblé examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: "Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want?" To find the answer, Kamblé explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kamblé combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines' identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race. Ideal for readers interested in gender studies and literary criticism, Creating Identity highlights a genre in which heroines do not accept that independence and strong, loving relationships are mutually exclusive but instead demand both, echoing the call from the very readers who have made this genre so popular.

Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programmes and queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday laughter, flirting, and teasing to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.

This is one of the first book-length English translations of Nazik Al-Mala'ika's Arabic poetry. One of the most influential Iraqi poets of the twentieth century, Nazik Al-Mala'ika pioneered the modern Arabic verse movement when she broke away from the formalistic classical modes of Arabic poetry that had prevailed for more than fifteen centuries. Along with 'Abdulwahhab Al-Bayyati and Badre Shakir Al-Sayyab, she paved the way for the birth of a new modernist poetic movement in the Arab world. Until now, very little of Al-Mala'ika's poetry has been translated into English. Listen to the Mourners contains forty of her most significant poems selected from six published volumes, including Life Tragedy and a Song for Man, The Woman in Love with the Night, Sparks and Ashes, The Wave's Nadir, The Moon Tree, and The Sea Alters Its Colours. These poems show the beginning of her development from the late romantic orientation in Arabic poetry toward a more psychological approach. Her poetic form shows a significant liberation from the traditional two-hemistich line in traditional Arabic poetry, which adheres to the traditional Arabic measures of prosody and rhyme. 'Abdulwahid Lu'lu'a's introduction functions as a critical analysis of the liberated verse movement of the era and situates the poet among her Arab and Western counterparts. This accessible, beautifully rendered, and long overdue translation fills a gap in modern Arabic poetry in translation and will interest students and scholars of Iraqi literature, Middle East studies, women's studies, and comparative literature.