This book's strongest appeal lies in its theoretical orientation, seeking to define frameworks that are most relevant to the Asian reality. These frameworks include compressed and semi-compressed modernity, familialism, familialization policy, unsustainable society, second demographic dividend, care diamond, and transnational public sphere. Such concepts are seen as essential in any discussion concerning the intimate and public spheres of contemporary Asia.

Paternity and fatherhood: is there more than an etymological difference between these two apparently synonymous terms? What do we understand by "paternity" and "fatherhood?" These crucial questions lie at the heart of this collection of essays selected from the humanities and social sciences. As an anthropological document, this book offers compelling evidence to support the premise that there is a profound difference between the biological reality of paternity and the cultural construct of fatherhood. At the same time, the theories of Freud and Lacan provide a background for many of the author's critical explorations of a kaleidoscope of literary texts, legal documents, case histories, painting and letters. Through their discussion of the relations, attitudes, emotions and values generated by the paternity/fatherhood distinction, the essays in this collection broaden our understanding of how dichotomy has evolved in Western societies and offer insights into its manifestations in some post-colonial cultures.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people's everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.

This volume offers a current reading of the Italian writer, Pirandello. The author examines the representation of gender relations in Pirandello's writing in the light of recent developments in textual analysis. She reassesses Pirandello's status as an innovative, avant-garde writer, arguing that whilst on the level of dramatic form he is certainly avant-garde, he is not so on the more covert level of gender relations. The author uses contemporary feminist theory to show how textual analysis can expose the covert reinforcement of patriarchal values. The study provides an illustration of a variety of methods which could be applied to texts other than those of Pirandello's.

This volume aims to describe the similarities and differences in the timing and kind of transition among the post-war cohorts in Austria, Britain, Flanders (Belgium), France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Spain. Its second aim is to bring together the results of individual-level studies from these ten European countries, analyzing the impact of selected determinants on the transition to adulthood.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Recent societal changes have challenged long-established concepts in psychoanalysis, including the Oedipus complex, parental functions, and male and female psychosexuality. 'Postmodern families', based on sexual and emotional exchanges independent of gender, now include homoerotic couples who adopt children, or who create them through assisted fertilisation, as well as single parent families and blended families. A number of highly-renowned Latin American psychoanalysts have drawn attention to the urgency of revising theoretical and clinical concepts in the light of these new scenarios. In this book, they open up ideas which cover familiar territory of current concerns in psychoanalytic work, as well as other little-explored areas, with the emphasis on evolving sexualities and new experiences of parenthood. The first section revisits psychoanalytic theories, particularly parental functions in the area of sexuality and gender. The following section discusses new family configurations, and vicissitudes of the desire to have a child in men and women, with the authors presenting some psychic consequences for parents in therapy who have turned to assisted fertilisation.

This groundbreaking book provides a new perspective on equality by highlighting and exploring affective equality, the aspect of equality concerned with relationships of love, care and solidarity. Drawing on studies of intimate caring, or "love laboring," it reveals the depth, complexity and multidimensionality of affective inequality.

This volume provides a comprehensive and concise overview on the nature and causes of prejudice. The importance of a scientific understanding of prejudice and racism, different approaches to the definition and conceptualization of prejudice, and the relation of prejudice and behavior are considered. John Duckitt also contributes a unique historical analysis of social scientific understandings of prejudice. He integrates an otherwise confusing mass of popular theories and perspectives into a coherent explanatory framework and develops this into a systemic multilevel approach to the problem of reducing prejudice in society and individuals.

From Duckitt's perspective, prejudices are remarkable not in their existence, but in their ubiquity--the ease with which they can be aroused, their variety of expression, and the tenacity with which they are held. He demonstrates that, although it is unlikely that the universal psychological processes which underlie a fundamental propensity for prejudice can be changed, the degree to which they come to be expressed can be: at the level of social structure and intergroup relations, in the social influences to which individuals are exposed, and in individual susceptibility. The Social Psychology of Prejudice will be of particular use to social scientists in the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology.

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces discourses of mourning (Klein), melancholia (Freud) and abjection (Kristeva) in Beckett's prose and drama, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often Beckett's objects of loss. This study primarily focuses on Beckett's exploitation of ambivalent yet conscious use of psychoanalytic concepts in his works on an aesthetic level. It also addresses the impact of one of the key events in Beckett's life, his self-imposed exile, on his poetics of grieving. By exploring Beckett's ambiguous representations of his homeland - Ireland - and women in general and the mother in particular throughout his oeuvre, this study unveils his uneasy relationship with them - an anxious part of his identity.

Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography is an eclectic and comprehensive collection of essays, exploring contemporary issues and debates concerning women's auto-biographical representations from a range of disciplinary perspectives. With authoritative contributions from a number of prominent figures in the field of women's auto/biography, as well as innovative new voices, this volume offers a broad and contemporary lens on the issues and debates relevant to the act of representing women's lives. Drawing on a variety of theoretical frameworks and discussing theatre, literature, popular culture and women in history, these essays help to map out some of the new intellectual spaces inhabited by feminist scholarship in the 1990s.

This book brings together a variety of studies that are engaged with notions of gender in different African localities, institutions and historical time periods. The objective is to expand empirical and theoretical studies that take seriously the idea that in order to understand gender and gender relations in Africa, we must start with Africa. If gender emerges out of particular histories and social contexts, we must therefore pay attention to the histories of genderings as well as the continuous ways in which gender is made and remade in everyday interactions, and by institutions. In this sense then, "gender" is actually more about gendering--a process--rather than something inherent in social relations.

"A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies" is the first single volume survey of current discussions taking place in this rapidly developing area of study.
Recognizing the multidisciplinary nature of the field, the editors gather new essays by an international team of established and emerging scholars
Addresses the politics, economics, history, and cultural impact of sexuality
Engages the future of queer studies by asking what sexuality stands for, what work it does, and how it continues to structure discussions in various academic disciplines as well as contemporary politics

This volume examines a wide variety of the ways in which the fantastic has impacted upon contemporary women's fiction. The study is based upon the work of fifteen different writers and includes novels by Allende, Atwood, Carter, Head, Morrison, Weldon, Winterson and Wittig.

The historical records and stories of enslaved African women have both creative and life-affirming resistance strategies for how women of the past have dealt with and healed from violence. This book draws on mid-seventeenth to nineteenth-century slave narratives to describe the depths of multi-dimensional oppression and violence in the lives of enslaved African women. Harrison investigates pre-colonial West and West Central African women's lives prior to European arrival in order to recover those African-derived aesthetic forms, cultural traditions, and religious practices that helped enslaved women combat violence and oppression. The nine strategies of resistance offered as modes of resistance employed by enslaved women are viable modes for modern-day women.

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical--and sexual--identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.

EU member states and candidate countries are increasingly exposed to the domestic impact of EU regulations, policy instruments, and discourses in the fields of gender equality and antidiscrimination. This impact not only affects national or subnational legislations and equality machineries, but also the framing and the wording of these policies, providing domestic actors with new resources and opportunity structures. This book explores the divergent policy outputs in the member states as regards the making of gender and other equalities, bringing together the most recent insights from Europeanization and gender scholars from a discursive-sociological perspective. Using largely unpublished empirical data, the book addresses policy issues ranging from gender violence to reconciliation and antidiscrimination policies, through case studies and comparisons covering up to 29 European countries. The result is a book that provides us with a more realistic and complex picture of Europeanization processes.

This volume is about gender, health and medicine broadly defined. From the essays in it, it is abundantly clear that medicine is a gendered and class-structured institution. Taken as a whole the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health and calls for more sociological input, qualitative research and an intersectional approach to help us understand various aspects of health and illness. Among the recurrent themes in the seven essays are the medicalization of personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control on the parts of recipients and dispensers of healthcare. Six of the seven essays deal with Western medicine exclusively, the seventh examines a situation where women have a choice between Western and traditional treatment. Timely topics such as somatic distress among women with breast cancer, drug company funding of research on women's sexual problems, and racial and ethnic health disparities are represented. A companion volume will focus on conventional and unconventional approaches to managing pregnancy and childbirth. The intended audience is the social science community, especially those who are interested in the social scientific study of medicine or of gender including those who may not be familiar with the areas in which the two overlap.

A trail-blazing and inspiring collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience and psychology featuring The Delusions of Certainty, winner of the European Essay Prize 2019. As well as being a prize-winning, bestselling novelist, Siri Hustvedt is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the fields of neurology, feminism, art criticism and philosophy. She believes passionately that art and science are too often kept separate and that conversations across disciplines are vital to increasing our knowledge of the human mind and body, how they connect and how we think, feel and see. The essays in this volume - all written between 2011 and 2015 - are in three parts. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women brings together penetrating pieces on particular artists and writers such as Picasso, Kiefer and Susan Sontag as well as essays investigating the biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. The Delusions of Certainty is an essay about the mind/body problem, showing how this age-old philosophical puzzle has shaped contemporary debates on many subjects and how every discipline is coloured by what lies beyond argument-desire, belief, and the imagination. The essays in the final section, What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition, tackle such elusive neurological disorders as synesthesia and hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound consideration of suicide and a towering reconsideration of Kierkegaard. Together they form an extremely stimulating, thoughtful, wide-ranging exploration of some of the fundamental questions about human beings and the human condition, delivered with Siri Hustvedt's customary lucidity, vivacity and infectiously questioning intelligence.

The articles in the volume examine the intersection of gender with other characteristics in a variety of settings including factory floors and corporate offices, welfare offices, state legislatures, the armed forces, universities, social clubs and playing fields. Central themes running through several of the articles include how men and women conceive their identities and their futures and talk about and manage their work, family and leisure lives, how women view their bodies and images, and the progress women have - or have not - made in over-coming poverty and advancing in the corporate, legislative and military worlds. The research sites include Canada, Cuba, England, Greece, Israel, Mexico and the United States. As in previous volumes in the series, the authors employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and build on the current literature. Most of the articles have policy implications and are designed to stimulate further research. The volume is introduced with an essay by the editor and framed by an article about feminist intersectional research.

From rococo to Edwardian fashions, Japanese street style has reinvented many western dress styles, reinterpreting and altering their meanings and messages in a different cultural and historical context. This wide ranging and original study reveals the complex exchange of styles and what they represent in Japan and beyond, contesting common perceptions of gender in Japanese dress and the notion that non-western fashions simply imitate western styles. Through case studies focussing on fashion image consumption in style tribes such as Kamikaze Girls, Lolita, Edwardian, Ivy Style, Victorian, Romantic and Kawaii, this ground-breaking book investigates the complexities of dress and gender and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in a global context. Japanese Fashion Cultures will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies, gender studies, media studies and related fields.

How have femininity and masculinity been defined and understood in China from prehistoric times to the present day? Gender History in China presents for the first time in English the work of leading Japanese scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, literature, sociology and law who examine the gender dynamics that have shaped and changed Chinese society over several thousand years. The eighteen chapters and six columns look at the ways gender norms and customary legal practices shaped the family, kinship, and the social order, and how those norms were reflected in work patterns, inheritance, daily life, and literary works. Attention is given to the fundamental principle of qi (material essence) as a building block in cosmology, as well as in legal understandings of family relations. The second part of the volume turns to the dramatic changes in gender patterns from the late nineteenth century, looking at the inflow of new ideas, the struggle for political rights and economic equality, and the institution of new gender norms in socialist and reform-era China. The authors take up such topics as the view of the body in relation to Chinese cosmology, the incorporation of the military man into China's model of hegemonic masculinity, the household registration system as a means of control, the appraisal of "talented women", and the intersection of gender norms and nationalism. Gender History in China enriches our understanding of Chinese history and of contemporary Chinese society.

This series is aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in the area of gender studies. It discusses topics such as gender labour markets and social policy, women and families in Costa Rica, and economic development, patriarchy, and intrahousehold dynamics.