Beginning with the myth of origin that joins every young Zaramo woman to her origins as she is initiated into the secrets of life and womanhood, the book then provides us with an historical account of the Tanzanian coast around Dar es Salaam as a background to the persistence of the cultural institutions to which the reader is introduced. Statements and narrations by Salome as a representative of the modern educated Zaramo people intersperse the author's descriptions of the rituals of womanhood, of individual and social healing, and of the ways conflict is symbolically manipulated and managed. Rituals are seen in their vibrant role, not as remnants of tradition, but as means of handling encroaching external pressures on the community. These pressures include, commercialization of livelihood, development thrust in the form of villagization, or the ongoing process of losing land rights. The book shows that a people will counteract the threat of social disintegration by overemphasizing their core values in an attempt to create strong communication forces and instruments of power. A good introduction to contemporary African issues, Third World women's studies, and ethnographic anthropology.

This book examines Shakespeare's depiction of foreign queens as he uses them to reveal and embody tensions within early modern English politics. Linking early modern and contemporary political theory and concerns through the concepts of fragmented identity, hospitality, citizenship, and banishment, Sandra Logan takes up a set of questions not widely addressed by scholars of early modern queenship. How does Shakespeare's representation of these queens challenge the opposition between friend and enemy that ostensibly defines the context of the political? And how do these queens expose the abusive potential of the sovereign? Focusing on Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, Hermione in The Winter's Tale, Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and Margaret in the first history tetralogy, Logan considers them as means for exploring conditions of vulnerability, alienation, and exclusion common to subjects of every social position, exposing the sovereign himself as the true enemy of the state.

This book examines the life-cycle of Victorian working-class marriage through a study of the hitherto hidden marital bed. Using coroners' inquests to gain intimate access to the working-class home and its inhabitants, this book explores their marital, quasi-marital, and post-marital beds to reveal the material, domestic, and emotional experience of working-class marriage during everyday life and at times of crisis. Drawing on the recent approach of utilising domestic objects to explore interpersonal relationships, the marital bed not only provides a rereading of the experiences of the working-class wife but also brings the much maligned or simply overlooked working-class husband into the picture. Moreover, it also extends our understanding of the various marriage-like arrangements existing throughout this class. Moving through the marital life-cycle, this book provides a greater understanding of marriages from the outset, during childbirth, at times of strife and marital breakdown, and upon the death of a spouse.

"Wives of the Leopard" explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions.

Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho," White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.>[ go to the Genders website ]

The fields of gender and religious studies have often been criticized for neglecting to engage with one another, and this volume responds to this dearth of interaction by placing the fields in an intimate dialogue. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach and drawing on feminist scholarship, the book undertakes theoretical and empirical explorations of relational and co-constitutive encounters of gender and religion. Through varied perspectives, the chapters address three interrelated themes: religion as practice, the relationship between religious practice and religion as prescribed by formal religious institutions, and the feminization of religion in Europe.

This work explores, through case studies and critical analyses, how media depictions affect the social construction of gender, sexuality, and identity. Through a combination of historical and contemporary topics, scholars examine the stereotypical portrayal of women and men and the contexts within which these stereotypes are illustrated. The studies also discuss the sociopolitical implications of symbols and images associated with these gender representations. Concrete references to particular media support both the methodological and theoretical approaches of the different essays. These quantitative and qualitative studies expose the myriad ways in which the media intervenes in our perception of popular culture.

Media and mass communication scholars will appreciate the many different media forms these essays encompass. The multicultural and gendered perspectives that comprise these writings will also appeal to students and educators of gender studies and contemporary rhetoric. Chapters are grouped in subsections that include newspaper, visual image in media, magazine, television, video, film, and cyberspace.

So entrenched and powerful is the patriarchy within organizations that women have serious difficulty acquiring positions of real importance, even when it is in the organization's best interest to use their talents fully (and reward them equitably). Reeves surveys the structural obstacles to women's advancement and argues that successful women executives threaten their male counterparts and their patriarchal culture, which responds by punishing them. Unlike other studies on the topic, Reeves explains the mechanisms by which gender discrimination operates--the dynamics of discrimination and the processes by which women in business are marginalized, subordinated, and excluded. Her book combines theory with first person case study accounts of 10 women who were suppressed, then fired. The result is a fresh, compelling argument that, despite claims to the contrary, the glass ceiling still exists. The patriarchy has simply devised subtle new ways to circumvent the legal remedies meant to crack through it.

Reeves reviews statistics on the role of women in work, patterns of horizontal and vertical segregation, and differences in the experiences of men and women, then turns to an assessment of the theories of women's subordination. She profiles each of her 10 women subjects, explains their education, career trajectory, and accomplishments. Their experiences reveal various mechanisms through which the patriarchy operates to subordinate successful women, such as communication patterns among men that minimize women's contributions, withholding of information, denial of status to women, intimidation tactics, and the double bind that women find themselves in when they seek fair treatment. After analyzing the women's termination in detail, Reeves discusses how each woman's personality played a role in her termination. Reeves ends by drawing conclusions on what the present and future seem to hold for women's progress in organizations, and particularly in publicly held corporations.

This book offers a social movement perspective on family violence, framing the discovery of abuse toward women and men as a natural development flowing out of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It combines clinical and statistical methods to yield a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics underlying spousal violence. It examines both men's violence and the violence of their female partners, both psychological as well as physical. The problem of women's violence is one that has remained largely ignored compared to the mountain of research on men's violence toward women. The authors present the first in-depth examination of how, when, and why women instigate violence and why violent couples require a systems-level intervention program rather than simply trying to counter male violence. There is a strong consideration of factors that can work to reduce or eliminate the problem.

This book examines female-headed households (FHHs) in the world economy, aspects of their poverty, and the implications of those for sustainable development. Following a general discussion of FHHs in the world community, the work discusses FHHs in two regions of India, one being an example of unsuccesssful development and the other of successful development. The research is based on fieldwork in five rural villages. One village, comprising mostly female-headed households, provided a unique case study. The other four villages include both male- and female-headed households with a high proportion of female-headed households.

The authors found that female-headed households dominate the poorer sections of the community, and women's access to resources is limited by cultural, social, and economic influences. Women, particularly those in FHHs, bear the heaviest burdens in times of economic hardship. These women face more forms of discrimination outside the home than women from male-headed households. They have fewer customary rights but greater freedom of movement and more opportunities for paid employment. The authors go on to show that the benefits of government development programs have not reached remote areas. The trickle-down approach has not worked, but sustainable development programs focusing on women's development and self-responsiblity have helped to lift the economic status of women in general and FHHs in particular.

How can depressed communities be upgraded? One approach is to import settlers with higher incomes. In a unique experiment in Israel, this approach was utilized, and the results are the focus of the Ayalon, Ben-Rafael, and Yogev study.

The three authors examine the costs and benefits of an experiment in community change in Mobiltown. The experiment, which brought higher status people to a poor community, is evaluated on the basis of surveys, indepth interviews, and observations. The research shows that the experiment has mainly resulted in the status enhancement of the community as a whole. Yet, expectations for social integration between the new and veteran residents were not fulfilled. Many of the cultural, economic, commercial, and social developments were based on some form of implicit segregation. The dynamics of unbalanced outcomes are demonstrated in the areas of intergroup attitudes, the formation of social networks, and in the political and educational arenas. The Mobiltown experiment demonstrates how the cost of newly introduced social gaps are countered by the benefits of the status enhancement of the entire community. An important study for sociologists, urban planners, and those concerned with social change in Israel.

During the 1960s, Margaret Mead's argument that gender identity is a product of learning in particular cultural contexts was incorporated into the sex/gender system in feminist theory. In this system, sex refers to physiological differences in the body and gender refers to learned sex-specific bodies to be viewed as separate and distinct from gender-neutral minds. In S/He Brain, Nadeau demonstrates that the sex/gender systemis not some arcane bit of academic jargon that has no impact on our daily lives. It is the greatest source of division and conflict in the politics of our sexual lives for a now obvious reason: the brains of men and women are not the same, and the differences have behavioral consequences. Further, he argues that an improved understanding of the relatinship between sex and gender could enlarge the bases for meaningful dialogue between men and women and lead to new standards for sexual equality that is more realistic and humane than the current standard. The individual most responsible for legitimating the modern distinction between sex and gender was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. According to the Mead doctrine, gender identity is almost entirely a product of learning in different cultural contexts, and sex, or biological reality, is not a determinant of this identity. The assumption that gender identity is learned in sexless, or gender-neutral, minds separate and distinct from sex-specific bodies legitimated the sex/gender system that has been foundational to feminist theory since the mid 1970s. In this system, sex refers to physiological differences in the domain of the body and gender to learned behavior in the domain of mind. Since this two-domain distinction obviated the connection between biological reality and gender identity, it allowed gender identity to be viewed as scripted or socially constructed by cultural narratives (stories, myths, legends, and the like) invented by men to control and oppress women. In ^IS/He Brain^R, Nadeau demonstrates that the sex/gender system is not in accord with biological reality for now obvious reasons-the brains of men and women are not the same, and the differences have behavioral consequences. Yet the intent of the book is to serve the cause of full sexual equality and not to escalate the gender war. Nadeau attempts to accomplish this by demonstrating that an improved understanding of the relationship between sex and gender can not only enlarge the bases for meaningful communication between men and women. It could also serve as the basis for a new and improved standard of sexual equality that eliminates the grossly unfair treatment of women sanctioned by the current standard.

"While feminist critics have re-invented the canon, studies of male authors have remained oddly ungendered. The authors in Peter Murphy's enlightening collection hold male authors up to a gender lens' to explore how in their lives and in their texts, these writers were working out issues of masculinity and sexuality. The refreshing results cross all boundaries cultural, sexual, even disciplinary."
--Michael S. Kimmel, SUNY, Stony Brook, Editor, "Men's Lives" and "Men Confront Pornography"

We are just beginning to understand masculinity as a fiction or a localizable, historical, and therefore unstable construct. This book points the way to a much-needed interrogation of the many modes of masculinity, as represented in literature. Both women and men who are engaged in critical thinking about genders and sexualities will find these essays always thoughtful and often provocative.
--Thas E. Morgan, Associate Professor of English, Arizona State University

Peter Murphy has assembled an innovative, challenging, and important set of contributions to a growing field of inquiry into constructions of masculinities in literature, inspired principally by feminist and gay studies. Illuminatingly crossing lines of genders, sexualities, cultures, and methodologies, "Fictions of Masculinity" greatly advances our understanding of representations of men, masculinities, misandry, and misogyny in a wide range of literary works and genres, and helps us to imagine (and thereby ultimately bring about) alternative constructions.
--Harry Brod, Editor, "The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies," "A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, and Theorizing Masculinities,"

Women writing about women dominates contemporary work on sexuality. Men have been far more willing to discuss female sexuality than male sexuality, while the most radical and insightful analyses of male sexuality have come from women. When men consider the issue of female sexuality they often speak from assumptions of security about their own unexamined sexuality. This book maintains that men have to interrogate their own sexuality if there is to be a revision of phallocentric discourse; and, that this revision of masculinity must be done in dialogue with women.

The essays included in this collection examine the deep structure of masculine codes. They ask the question Who are the men in modern literature? Examining the force of the dominant values of Western masculinity, they synthesize insights from feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and new historicism. These perspectives help explain how male sexuality has been structured by fictional representations.

By examining the images of masculinity in modern literature, the essays explore traditional and non-traditional roles of men in society and in personal relationships. They look at how men are represented in literature, the fiction of manhood. They attempt to unravel the assumptions behind these representations by looking at the implications of this imagination. And they speculate on possibilities for creating a new imaginary of masculinity by identifying what literature has to say about that change.

With analyses of a range of genres (novels, poetry, plays and autobiography), Western and Third World literatures, and theoretical perspectives, "Fictions of Masculinity" provides a significant contribution to thisrapidly growing field of study.
Contributors are: David Bergman (Towson State University), Miriam Cooke (Duke University), Martin Danahy (Emory University), Richard Dellamora (Trent University, Ontario), Leonard Duroche (University of Minnesota), Jim Elledge (Illinois State University), Alfred Habegger (University of Kansas), Suzanne Kehde (California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo), David Leverenz (University of Florida), Christopher Metress (Wake Forest University), Peter F. Murphy (SUNY, Empire State College), Rafael Prez-Torres (University of Pennsylvania), David Radavich (Eastern Illinois University), and Peter Schwenger (St. Vincent University, Nova Scotia).

The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. "Pastimes and Politics" explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves' ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered.
"Pastimes and Politics" examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders' changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived.
Methodologically innovative and clearly written, "Pastimes and Politics" is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.

This book features the best papers presented at the Singapore Conference on Applied Psychology in 2016. Chapters include research conducted by experts in the field of applied psychology from the Asia-Pacific region, and cover areas such as community and environmental psychology, psychotherapy and counseling, health, child and school psychology, and gender studies. Put together by East Asia Research (Singapore), in collaboration with Hong Kong Shue Yan University, this book serves as a valuable resource for readers wanting to access to the latest research in the field of applied psychology with a focus on Asia-Pacific.

This study offers a radical rereading of Conrad's work in the light of contemporary theories of masculinity. Drawing on gay studies, feminism, film theory and literary theory, the author aims to show how Conrad's fiction, even as it reflects certain assumptions of its day about the role of men in society, offers striking insights into the instability of the 'masculine. The book explores the relationship of masculinity with colonialism, modernity, the visual and the body in a wide range of Conrad's major and lesser known fiction.

In the current debate around sexting, this book gives a nuanced account of motives, contexts and possible risks of intimate digital communication. Authors discuss how social media shape new dating opportunities through apps and dating sites, how sexting fits within individual's relational and sexual development. They examine the relationships between sexting, health and sexual risk behaviours and focusing on adolescents, further highlight which role parents can play in relational and sexual education. Chapters cover topics such as abusive sexting behaviours in the context of dating violence and slut shaming, media discourses concerning sexting and the legal framework in several countries that shape the context of sexting. This edited collection will be of great interest to academics and students of communication studies, psychology, health sciences and sociology, as well as policy makers and the general public interested in current debates on how social media are used for intimate communication.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of public opinion patterns among Muslims, particularly in the Arab world. On the basis of data from the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer Project and the Arab Opinion Index, it compares the dynamics of Muslim opinion structures with global publics and arrives at social scientific predictions of value changes in the region. Using country factor scores from a variety of surveys, it also develops composite indices of support for democracy and a liberal society on a global level and in the Muslim world, and analyzes a multivariate model of opinion structures in the Arab world, based on over 40 variables from 12 countries in the Arab League and covering 67% of the total population of the Arab countries. While being optimistic about the general, long-term trend towards democracy and the resilience of Arab and Muslim civil society to Islamism, the book also highlights anti-Semitic trends in the region and discusses them in the larger context of xenophobia in traditional societies. In light of the current global confrontation with radical Islamism, this book provides vital material for policy planners, academics and think tanks alike.

This book employs a broad analysis of Chinese patriliny to propose a distinctive theoretical conceptualization of the role of desire in culture. It utilizes a unique synthesis of Marxian and psychoanalytic insights in arguing that Chinese patriliny is best understood as, simultaneously, "a mode of production of desire" and as "instituted fantasy." The argument advances through discussions and analyses of kinship, family, gender, filial piety, ritual, and (especially) mythic narratives. In each of these domains, P. Steven Sangren addresses the complex sentiments and ambivalences associated with filial relations. Unlike most earlier studies which approach Chinese patriliny and filial piety as irreducible markers of cultural difference, Sangren argues that Chinese patriliny is better approached as a topic of critical inquiry in its own right.

Carol Royce begins life as a male then one day following an accident fully realises that she is trapped in the wrong sex. With great humour and pathos along the way her story leads to comment on the state of humanity. Her quest to be the woman she feels she really is takes her down many exciting and dangerous paths. She has been a father to two families and a mother to one in communal accommodation on the North Norfolk Coast. Her gender realignment operation day arrives culminating in her rebirth. There is still one last hurdle to overcome though.

This book draws on the voices of sex workers and their clients to critically assess the criminalization of prostitution in favour of decriminalization. It does so by contrasting their voices with the claims made by prohibitionists: those advocating the prohibition of prostitution or, at least, the prohibition of the purchase of sexual services, and notes scholarly research that gives context to those accounts and claims. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular issue which is given currency in academic and public debates on sex work. The first part of each chapter reviews the state of research and publicly-aired contentions and the second part compares sex workers' voices with claims from prohibitionists. It highlights the gap between what many sex workers have to say about themselves and what theorizing prohibitionists say about all prostitution. It argues that there is often a striking contrast in attitude, perspective, interpretation and valuation. This books speaks primarily to prohibitionist thinking and sex work stereotyping and, secondarily, to the debate on decriminalization of sex work.

This book looks at the centerpiece of the international women's rights discourse, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and asks to what extent it affects the lives of women worldwide. Rather than assuming a trickle-down effect, the author discusses specific methods which have made CEDAW resonate. These methods include attempts to influence the international level by clarifying the meaning of women's rights and strengthening the Convention's monitoring procedure, and building connections between international and domestic contexts that enable diverse actors to engage with CEDAW. This analysis shows that while the Convention has worldwide impact, this impact is fundamentally dependent on context-specific values and agency. Hence, rather than thinking of women's rights exclusively as normative content, Zwingel suggests to see them as in process. This book will especially appeal to students and scholars interested in transnational feminism and gender and global governance.

Luce Irigaray: Teaching explores ways to confront new issues in education. Three essays byIrigaray herself present the outcomes of her own experiments in this area and develop proposals for teaching people how to coexist in difference, reach self-affection, and rethink the relations between teachers and students. In the last few years, Irigaray has brought together young academics from various countries, universities and disciplines, all of whom were carrying out research into her work. These research students have received personal instruction from Irigaray and at the same time have learnt from one another by sharing with the group their own knowledge and experience. Most of the essays in this book are the result of this dynamic way of learning that fosters rigour in thinking as well as mutual respect for differences. The central themes of the volume focus on five cultural fields: methods of recovery from traumatic personal or cultural experience; the resources that arts offer for dwelling in oneself and with the other(s); the maternal order and feminine genealogy; creative interpretation and embodiment of the divine; and new perspectives in philosophy. This innovative collaborative project between Irigaray and researchers involved in the study of her work gives a unique insight into the topics that have occupied this influential international theorist over the last thirty years.