This book examines women's participation in social, economic and political development in West Africa. The book looks at women from the premise of being active agents in the development processes within their communities, thereby subverting the dominate narrative of women as passive recipients of development.

Eunuchs tend to be associated with eastern courts, popularly perceived as harem personnel. However, the Roman empire was also distinguished by eunuchs - they existed as slaves, court officials, religious figures and free men. This book is the first to be devoted to the range of Roman eunuchs. Across seven chapters (spanning the third century BC to the sixth century AD), Shaun Tougher examines the history of Roman eunuchs, focusing on key texts and specific individuals. Subjects met include the Galli (the self-castrating devotees of the goddess the Great Mother), Terence's comedy The Eunuch (the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word 'eunuch'), Sporus and Earinus the eunuch favourites of the emperors Nero and Domitian, the 'Ethiopian eunuch' of the Acts of the Apostles (an early convert to Christianity), Favorinus of Arles (a superstar intersex philosopher), the Grand Chamberlain Eutropius (the only eunuch ever to be consul), and Narses the eunuch general who defeated the Ostrogoths and restored Italy to Roman rule. A key theme of the chapters is gender, inescapable when studying castrated males. Ultimately this book is as much about the eunuch in the Roman imagination as it is the reality of the eunuch in the Roman empire.

The surprising true story of Mexico's hunt, arrest, and conviction of its first female serial killer For three years, amid widespread public outrage, police in Mexico City struggled to uncover the identity of the killer responsible for the ghastly deaths of forty elderly women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by someone posing as a government nurse. When Juana Barraza Samperio, a female professional wrestler known as la Dama del Silencio (the Lady of Silence), was arrested-and eventually sentenced to 759 years in prison-for her crimes as the Mataviejitas (the little old lady killer), her case disrupted traditional narratives about gender, criminality, and victimhood in the popular and criminological imagination. Marshaling ten years of research, and one of the only interviews that Juana Barraza Samperio has given while in prison, Susana Vargas Cervantes deconstructs this uniquely provocative story. She focuses, in particular, on the complex, gendered aspects of the case, asking: Who is a killer? Barraza-with her "manly" features and strength, her career as a masked wrestler in lucha libre, and her violent crimes-is presented, here, as a study in gender deviance, a disruption of what scholars call mexicanidad, or the masculine notion of what it means to be Mexican. Cervantes also challenges our conception of victimhood-specifically, who "counts" as a victim. The Little Old Lady Killer presents a fascinating analysis of what serial killing-often considered "killing for the pleasure of killing"-represents to us.

This book is a collection of essays highlighting different disciplinary, topical, and practical approaches to the study of kink and popular culture. The volume is written by both academics and practitioners, bringing the essays a special perspective not seen in other volumes. Essays included examine everything from Nina Hartley fan letters to kink shibari witches to kink tourism in a South African prison. The focus is not just on kink as a sexual practice, but on kink as a subculture, as a way of living, and as a way of seeing popular culture in new and interesting ways.

The development of new sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century. The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for equality have become a major concern in both fields. The legacy of this process has its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. The Victorian preoccupation about the female body and sexual promiscuity was focused on the regulation of deviant elements in society and the control of venereal disease; homosexuals, lesbians, and prostitutes' identities were considered out of the norm and against the moral values of the time. The relationship between sexuality and gender identity has attracted wide-ranging discussion amongst feminist theorists during the last few decades. The methodologies of cultural studies and, in particular, of post-structuralism and post-colonialism, urges us to read and interpret different cultures and different texts in ways that enhance personal and collective views of identity which are culturally grounded. These readings question the postmodernist concept of identity by looking into more progressive views of identity and difference addressing post-positivist interpretations of key identity markers such as sex, gender, race, and agency. As a consequence, an individual's identity is recognized as culturally constructed and the result of power relations. Identities on the Move: Contemporary Representations of New Sexualities and Gender Identities offers creative insights on pressing issues and engages in productive dialogue. Identities on the Move to addresses the topic of new sexualities and gender identities and their representation in post-colonial and contemporary Anglophone literary, historical, and cultural productions from a trans-national, trans-cultural, and anti-essentialist perspective. The authors include the views and concerns of people of color, of women in the diaspora, in our evermore multiethnic and multicultural societies, and their representation in the media, films, popular culture, subcultures, and the arts.

This work offers parents, educators, and librarians a practical guide to discovering the ways gender identities are constructed through literacy practices, providing recommendations for addressing gender inequities in schools and in the community at large. Gender and Literacy: A Handbook for Educators and Parents focuses on issues related to the gendered experience of students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, promoting an understanding that the issues surrounding gender cannot be reduced to broad generalizations. Author Karen A. Krasny seeks to make clear the complex notion of gender construction within the context of redefining what constitutes legitimate literacy practices in schools. This handbook will help to guide educators, parents, and librarians by assisting them in the selection and evaluation of print and media resources. The first chapter explains the need to understand the complex relationship between gender and literacy. The bulk of the book provides readers with a critical review of the studies conducted to investigate gendered literacy practices, while the last three chapters focus on actionable strategies and policy making.

Between adolescence and adulthood, individuals begin to explore themselves mentally and emotionally in an attempt to figure out who they are and where they fit in society. Social technologies in the modern age have ushered in an era where these evolving adolescents must circumvent the negative pressures of online influences while also still trying to learn how to be utterly independent. Recent Advances in Digital Media Impacts on Identity, Sexuality, and Relationships is a collection of critical reference materials that provides imperative research on identity exploration in emerging adults and examines how digital media is used to help explore and develop one's identity. While highlighting topics such as mobile addiction, online intimacy, and cyber aggression, this publication explores a crucial developmental period in the human lifespan and how digital media hinders (or helps) maturing adults navigate life. This book is ideally designed for therapists, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, researchers, educators, academicians, and professionals.

In recent years, the media has attributed the surge of people eagerly studying family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. New genealogy-themed television series and internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have also flourished, capitalizing on this new popularity and on the mapping of the human genome. But what's really happening here, and what does this mean for sometimes volatile conceptions of race and ethnicity? In Alternate Roots, Christine Scodari engages with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television miniseries Roots, DNA testing for genetic ancestry, Ancestry.com, and genealogy-related television series, including those shows hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. She lays out how family historians can understand intersections and historical and ongoing relations of power related to the ethnicity, race, class, and/or gender of their ancestors as well as to members of other groups. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality make connections not only between and among identities, but also between local findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given the genealogy-related media institutions, tools, texts, practices, and technologies currently available, Scodari's study probes the viability of a critical genealogy based upon race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own Italian and Italian American ancestry, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger contexts. Filling gaps in the research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity, Scodari mobilizes cultural studies, media studies, and her own genealogical practices in a critical pursuit to interrogate key issues bound up in the creation of family history.

"Since the fall of the Berlin wall there has been a surprising dearth of high quality of scholarship on legal culture in the communist successor states of East Central Europe. In this excellent book Barbara Havelkova engages with the reversal of many of the advances the socialist period made in gender relations, examining the historical roots of the current failure of Czech law to engage with the discriminatory practices that have negatively affected the lives of women. She does this by a forensic excavation of law, discourses and practices of the socialist era revealing the patriarchal assumptions underpinning them that became deeply embedded in Czech legal culture, and that have been carried forward to the present day. The book is a compelling read. It provides answers to many of the questions that have perplexed feminists about the post-soviet transition and at the same time speaks more generally to the debates surrounding the troubling rightward shift in the politics of the communist successor states of Europe." Professor Judith Pallot, President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies "In Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism, Barbara Havelkova offers a sober and sophisticated socio-legal account of gender equality law in Czechia. Tracing gender equality norms from their origins under state socialism, Havelkova shows how the dominant understanding of the differences between women and men as natural and innate combined with a post-socialist understanding of rights as freedom to shape the views of key Czech legal actors and to thwart the transformative potential of EU sex discrimination law. Havelkova's compelling feminist legal genealogy of gender equality in Czechia illuminates the path dependency of gender norms and the antipathy to substantive gender equality that is common among the formerly state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Her deft analysis of the relationship between gender and legal norms is especially relevant today as the legitimacy of gender equality laws is increasingly precarious." Professor Judy Fudge, Kent Law School Gender equality law in Czechia, as in other parts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, is facing serious challenges. When obliged to adopt, interpret and apply anti-discrimination law as a condition of membership of the EU, Czech legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of key ideas underpinning it. This important new study explores this scepticism to gender equality law, examining it with reference to legal and socio-legal developments that started in the state-socialist past and that remain relevant today. The book examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in equality and anti-discrimination law. But it goes further, shedding light on the underlying understandings of key concepts such as women, gender, equality, discrimination and rights. In so doing, it shows the fundamental intellectual and conceptual difficulties faced by gender equality law in Czechia. These include an essentialist understanding of differences between men and women, a notion that equality and anti-discrimination law is incompatible with freedom, and a perception that existing laws are objective and neutral, while any new gender-progressive regulation of social relations is an unacceptable interference with the 'natural social order'. Timely and provocative, this book will be required reading for all scholars of equality and gender and the law.

Sustainable Work in Europe brings together a strong core of Swedish working life research, with additional contributions from across Europe, and discussion of current issues such as digitalisation, climate change and the Covid pandemic. It bridges gaps between social science and medicine, and adds emphasis on age and gender. The book links workplace practice, theory and policy, and is intended to provide the basis for ongoing debate and dialogue.

Friendships between women and gay men captivated the American media in the opening decade of the 21st century. John Portmann places this curious phenomenon in its historical context, examining the changing social attitudes towards gay men in the postwar period and how their relationships with women have been portrayed in the media. As women and gay men both struggled toward social equality in the late 20th century, some women understood that defending gay men - who were often accused of effeminacy - was in their best interest. Joining forces carried both political and personal implications. Straight women used their influence with men to prevent bullying and combat homophobia. Beyond the bureaucratic fray, women found themselves in transformed roles with respect to gay men - as their mothers, sisters, daughters, caregivers, spouses, voters, employers and best friends. In the midst of social hostility to gay men during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, a significant number of gay women volunteered to comfort the afflicted and fight reigning sexual values. Famous women such as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand threw their support behind a detested minority, while countless ordinary women did the same across America. Portmann celebrates not only women who made the headlines but also those who did not. Looking at the links between the women's liberation and gay rights movements, and filled with concrete examples of personal and political relationships between straight women and gay men, Women and Gay Men in the Postwar Period is an engaging and accessible study which will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th- and 21st century social and gender history.

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.

Gender can be rendered invisible when the gendered nature of institutions is ignored or when the genders of participants in events or movements are not identified. The genders of non-binary and gender-diverse individuals can be erased when gender is conceived of as binary. From an intersectional perspective, genders of people of various classes, castes, races, ethnicities, ages, occupations, or other specific characteristics may be absent from data, erased from public view or rendered invisible by stereotypes or policy decisions. Gender Visibility and Erasure offers a unique way of focusing on gender by identifying the multiple contexts in which issues of visibility, invisibility, and erasure manifest. It is a consideration of who is seen and who is ignored, who has voice and who is silenced, who has agency and who is controlled. Social, cultural, and political factors associated with gender and visibility are also discussed throughout the work. International in perspective, further considerations are made around how gender visibility may change over time in varying contexts such as migration, a program for recruiting lower income girls into STEM fields, academia, government family planning policy, and domestic violence. This 33rd volume of the Advanced Gender Research series, Gender Visibility and Erasure is the ideal work for those studying and researching the in/visibility aspects regarding gender and how this currently and may continue to impact society.

Sex Differences in the Central Nervous System offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of sex differences research, from both the basic science and clinical research perspectives. Given the current NIH directive that funded preclinical research must consider both females and males, this topic is of interest to an increasing percentage of the neuroscience research population. The volume serves as an invaluable resource, offering coverage of a wide range of topics: sex differences in cognition, learning, and memory, sex hormone signaling mechanisms, neuroimmune interactions, epigenetics, social behavior, neurologic disease, psychological disorders, and stress. Discussions of research in both animal models and human patient populations are included.

Fierce debate has long loomed over Title IX, the landmark legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, whether in academics or athletics. Since its inception, Title IX has inspired both backlash and backlash-against-backlash commentary. Supporters contend that the legislation is a long overdue measure in securing equal opportunities for girls and women in America's school and university athletics. Opponents argue that Title IX is nothing more than a government-enforced quota system that is damaging men's sports programs. Caught in the middle are the schools that struggle to develop equitable sports programs for male and female athletes. From the hard fought passing of Title IX in 1972 to the most recent debates surrounding compliance, this encyclopedia explores the significant individuals, schools, events, key concepts, controversies, and legal cases revolving around Title IX and its application in collegiate athletics. This encyclopedia, the first of its kind, offers a comprehensive guide to various aspects and wide ranging issues associated with Title IX and sports. With more than 150 in-depth entries, this inclusive and authoritative reference will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers interested in both the historic framework and contemporary implications of Title IX and academic athletics. Sample entries include: A League of Their Own Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women v. NCAA (1984) Bonnie Blair Molly "Machine Gun" Bolin California NOW v. Board of Trustees of California State Universities (1993) Commission on Equal Opportunity in Athletics Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act Patsy Mink Ms. Foundation National Women's Football League NationalWrestling Coaches Assocation Pederson v. Louisiana State University (2000) Three Part Test

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. French publicists, journalists, and government officials working in the tourism industry began a concerted effort to improve France's international image and win valuable tourist money by promoting the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful. Charm Offensive explores how this elevation of French femininity created problems on both sides of the equation: the pressure on French women to conform to an exacting physical standard was immense, while the inability of anyone else to access that standard, coupled with the constant prods to try, resulted in a sense of failure. Drawing on cultural figures like Air France air hostesses, tourism workers, and celebrities such as Brigitte Bardot, the book demonstrates how women were mobilized as ambassadors of French superiority. Analysing cultural and political sources simultaneously, Charm Offensive offers an innovative understanding of a tumultuous time of decolonization.

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.

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the "fantasy of identification"--the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact.From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.