This is the first book to examine the same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides reported in India over the last two decades. Ruth Vanita examines these cases in the context of a wide variety of same-sex unions, from Fourteenth-century narratives about co-wives who miraculously produce a child together, to Nineteenth-century depictions of ritualized unions between women, to marriages between gay men and lesbians arranged over the internet. Examining the changing legal, literary, religious and social Indian and Euro-American traditions within which same-sex unions are embedded, she brings a fresh perspective to the gay marriage debate, suggesting that same-sex marriage dwells not at the margins but at the heart of culture. Love's Rites by Ruth Vanita is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

A rich ethnographic portrait of food-provisioning processes in a contemporary African city, offering valuable lessons about the powerful roles of gender, migration, exchange, sex, and charity in food acquisition. Based on anthropologist Karen Coen Flynn's study of Mwanza, Tanzania, this work draws on the personal accounts of over 350 market vendors, low, middle and high-income consumers, urban farmers as well as those, including children, who live on the streets. This strikingly original work offers interdisciplinary appeal to a broad audience of both students and professionals interested in anthropology, African studies, urban studies, gender studies and development economics.

This book re-examines political, conceptual and methodological concerns of 'intersectionality', bringing these into conversation with sexuality studies. It explores sexual identifications, politics and inequalities as these (dis)connect across time and place, and are re-constituted in relation to class, disability, ethnicity, gender and age.

Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations. -- .

This unique book examines the relationship between wounding and sexuality, bringing together issues around sexuality, gender, power, violence and representations. Drawing on a range of disciplines including cultural and media studies, sociology and psychology, it explores social practices such as S&M, cosmetic surgery and extreme sports.

This is the first study to fully trace the influence of Sensibility on British Romanticism. Sensibility continually found new forms of expression in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. Nagle explores how it coexisted and intermingled with Romanticism and revises the traditional narratives of literary periodization of this era.

This book studies the relationship between Islam, family processes, and gender inequality among Uyghur Muslims in r mchi, China. Empirically, it shows in quantitative terms the extent of gender inequalities among Uyghur Muslims in r mchi and tests whether the gender inequalities are a difference in kind or in degree. It examines five aspects of gender inequality: employment, income, household task accomplishment, home management, and spousal power. Theoretically, it investigates how Islamic affiliation and family life affect Uyghur women 's status.

Zang 's research involved rare and privileged access to a setting which is difficult for foreign scholars to study due to political restrictions. The data are drawn from fieldwork in r mchi between 2005 and 2008, which include a survey of 577 families, field observations, and 200 in-depth interviews with local Uyghurs. The book combines qualitative and quantitative data and methods to study gendered behavior and outcomes. The author 's study reinterprets family power and offers a more nuanced analysis of gender and domestic power in China and makes a pioneering effort to study spousal power, gender inequality in labor market outcomes, and gender inequality in household chores among members of ethnic minorities in China.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, Chinese studies, Asian anthropology and cultural sociology.

Demonstrates that the intersection between race, gender, and class formed the backbone of Progressive-Era debates over sex education, the policing of sexuality, and the prevention of venereal disease. Against the backdrop of the Progressive Era, World War I, and the 1920s, sex education burgeoned in the United States through institutions like the YMCA, the popular press, girls' schools, and the US military. As access to sexualknowledge increased, reformers debated what the messages of a sex-education curriculum should be and, perhaps more important, who would receive those messages. Courtney Shah's study chronicles this debate, showing that sex education then, just as in our own era, had as much to do with politics and morals as it did with biology and medicine. Examining how different population groups in the United States were given contrasting types of sex education, Shah demonstrates that such education was used as a tool to reinforce or challenge racial segregation, women's rights, religious diversity, and class identity. Courtney Shah is an instructor of history at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington.

Romantic Visualities offers a culturally informed understanding of the literary significance of landscape in the Romantic period. Labbe argues that the Romantic period associated the prospect view with the masculine ideal, simultaneously fashioning the detailed point of view as feminised. An interdisciplinary study, it discusses the cultural construction of gender as defined through landscape viewing, and investigates property law, aesthetic tracts, conduct books, travel narratives, artistic theory, and the work of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Ann Francis, Dorothy Wordsworth and others.

This book examines the intricate challenges faced by women and families during the transition to motherhood. It presents unique theoretical and methodological approaches to studying women's transition from being employees to working mothers. Its focus is on the impact of work on the transition to motherhood, and the impact of motherhood on women's working arrangements, work attitudes, work experiences and perspectives. Special attention is given to intervention research that can enhance the health and well-being of mothers and employers as they reconcile demands of the family-work interface. Integrating theoretical framework development and methodological considerations, this book provides an in-depth introduction to the topic. It brings together researchers and experts on the work-family interface, on workplace discrimination during pregnancy and early motherhood, and well-being.

"Advances in gender research" is a new series aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in an area of rapid change and with a subject which is interdisciplinary spanning the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. The papers in volume 1 reflect the current state of gender research in terms of the variety of material and the approach. The authors take various positions within the configuration which include liberal, radical and material feminisms. The pieces also vary in the extent to which the authors' theoretical orientation and ideas about social change are implicit or explicit. The diversity of current gender research is shown in the subjects presented ranging from an examination of the everyday world experienced by poor women and women of colour in American society and post-colonial women on a global basis to research along the critical lines of postmodernism and queer theory. Focus is placed on 'advances' and developments in gender theory. This new series will be of interest to scholars and experts in sociology, anthropology, ethnography, political science and to those with a particular interest in gender studies and race and ethnic relations.

Radical changes in understandings of gender over the last two centuries are at the heart of some of the most controversial issues within Jewish life and law. They have influenced the basic concepts of Judaism, of family structure, of liturgy, of thoughts about leadership and of Halakhah. This volume discusses some of these changes and new definitions and how they continue to be reflected in the developing reform Halakhah.

In this study, critics working in Britain, Canada and the United States discuss modernism's imaginative rethinkings of sex, gender and sexuality. Employing diverse theoretical approaches, the essays in this volume show how modernism intersects with historical developments such as the suffragette movement, technological change and its effects on women and labour, the growth of pseudo-scientific writings and the burgeoning lesbian and gay movement. They show how modernism questions the fundamentals of identity and upsets the fixities of gender and sexuality through a fascination with ambiguities, marginality and the crossing of borders. The book explores strategies of expressing same-sex desires in unexpected settings, modes of remaking sex and the body, relations between writing and reading, between public and private, between performer, performance and audience in a modernism broadly conceived to include political demonstrations, political essays and the visual arts alongside narrative and poetry.

This handbook is intended for faculty and administrators who wish to create a welcoming and safe environment for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students on our campuses. It will help readers, even those who may struggle personally with understanding non-heterosexual identities, gain a clearer understanding of the important issues facing these students. While some students arrive on campus with full clarity about their sexual identities, others may just be discovering their orientations while in our institutions. It is difficult to provide the attention LGBT students need if we do not understand the crises affecting them or how to address them. Each chapter analyzes specific issues affecting these students and offers recommendations or suggestions for change. Some of the areas discussed include: identity development theories, residence halls, career planning, health and counseling centers, HIV/AIDS, and student leadership and organizational development. Non-heterosexual faculty and staff may also find this work useful as they attempt to discover themselves in academic and educational literature. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students are on our campuses. They are either discovering their orientations while in our institutions or arriving with full clarity about their sexual identities. It is difficult to provide the attention these students need if we do not understand the issues or how to address them. This handbook is a guide to providing services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. It is for all faculty and administrators, especially those who may struggle personally with understanding non-heterosexual identities, who wish to create a safe and welcoming environment for all students. Non-heterosexual faculty and staff may also find this work useful as they attempt to discover themselves in academic and educational literature. Each section presents an area in which questions usually arise. Chapters within the sections dissect specific issues and, where appropriate, offer recommendations for change. Some of those areas include: identity development theories; residence halls; career planning; health and counseling centers; HIV/AIDS; students with disabilities; same-sex dating and domestic violence; athletics; fraternities; student leadership; speakers' bureaus and safe zone programs; commuter schools and church-related institutions; and Internet resources.

Women of color, including Asian Pacific American (APA) women, have made considerable inroads into elective office in the United States in recent years; in fact, their numbers have grown more rapidly than those of white women. Nonetheless, focusing only on success stories gives the false impression that racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are not barriers for APA candidates to public office. It also detracts attention from the persistent and severe under-representation of all women and nonwhite men in elective office in the United States. In Contesting the Last Frontier, Pei-te Lien and Nicole Filler examine the scope and significance of the rise of Asian Pacific Americans in US elective office over the past half-century. To help interpret the complex experiences of these political women and men situated at the intersection of race, gender, and other dimensions of marginalization, Lien and Filler adopt an intersectionality framework that puts women of color at the center of their analysis. They also draw on their own original dataset of APA electoral participation over the past 70 years, as well as in-depth interviews with elected officials. They examine APA candidates' trajectories to office, their divergent patterns of political socialization, the barriers and opportunities they face on the campaign trail, and how these elected officials enact their roles as representatives at local, state, and federal levels of government. In turn, they counter various tropes, including the "model minority" myth that suggests that Asian Americans have attained a level of success in education, work, and politics that precludes attention to racial discrimination. Importantly, the book also provides a look into how APA elected officials of various origins strive to serve the interests of the rapidly expanding and majority-immigrant population, especially those disadvantaged by the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and nativity. Ambitious and comprehensive, Contesting the Last Frontier fills an important gap in American electoral history and uncovers the lived experiences of APA women and men on the campaign trail and in elective office.

Winner, 2017 Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, presented by the American Sociological Association Winner, 2016 Donald Light Award for the Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology, presented by the American Sociological Association A personal, compelling perspective on how medical diagnoses can profoundly hurt, or help, the lived experiences of entire communities When sociologist Georgiann Davis was a teenager, her doctors discovered that she possessed XY chromosomes, marking her as intersex. Rather than share this information with her, they withheld the diagnosis in order to "protect" the development of her gender identity; it was years before Davis would see her own medical records as an adult and learn the truth. Davis' experience is not unusual. Many intersex people feel isolated from one another and violated by medical practices that support conventional notions of the male/female sex binary which have historically led to secrecy and shame about being intersex. Yet, the rise of intersex activism and visibility in the US has called into question the practice of classifying intersex as an abnormality, rather than as a mere biological variation. This shift in thinking has the potential to transform entrenched intersex medical treatment. In Contesting Intersex, Davis draws on interviews with intersex people, their parents, and medical experts to explore the oft-questioned views on intersex in medical and activist communities, as well as the evolution of thought in regards to intersex visibility and transparency. She finds that framing intersex as an abnormality is harmful and can alter the course of one's life. In fact, controversy over this framing continues, as intersex has been renamed a 'disorder of sex development' throughout medicine. This happened, she suggests, as a means for doctors to reassert their authority over the intersex body in the face of increasing intersex activism in the 1990s and feminist critiques of intersex medical treatment. Davis argues the renaming of 'intersex' as a 'disorder of sex development' is strong evidence that the intersex diagnosis is dubious. Within the intersex community, though, disorder of sex development terminology is hotly disputed; some prefer not to use a term which pathologizes their bodies, while others prefer to think of intersex in scientific terms. Although terminology is currently a source of tension within the movement, Davis hopes intersex activists and their allies can come together to improve the lives of intersex people, their families, and future generations. However, for this to happen, the intersex diagnosis, as well as sex, gender, and sexuality, needs to be understood as socially constructed phenomena. A personal journey into medical and social activism, Contesting Intersex presents a unique perspective on how medical diagnoses can affect lives profoundly. Ask us about setting up a Skype-in with the author for your class Watch Georgiann Davis in National Geographic's Gender Revolution documentary with Katie Couric

The author examines practitioners of medicine, as well as patients, as embodied and sexed subjects in this book. She brings together cultural and feminist theories on the body, 19th-century medical history and the history of gender and Victorian feminism. The book seeks to investigate the ways in which many different practitioners - male and female doctors, nurses, midwives, accoucheurs - were implicated in a discourse and a material practice about the pure and the polluted.

The Life of Voices illustrates how human voices have special significance as the place where mind and body collaborate to produce everyday speech. Hannah Rockwell links Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue with French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views of the relation between bodies and speech expression to develop a unique theory of communication and bodies. By introducing readers to actual human subjects speaking about how their identities have been shaped and transformed through time, the author explores how discourses reproduce ideology and social power relations. Readers are challenged to consider complex influences between human subjects and institutionalized discourses through critical-interpretive analyses of transcribed speech.

The Life of Voices has an interdisciplinary flair grounded in careful research. Scholars in communication, sociology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, gender studies and identity politics will find valuable insights, methods and examples in this work. It is essential reading for anyone who is interested in discourse studies and the body's relationship to speech or human identity formation.

In these eleven essays scholars from diverse disciplines address the argument, reception, and implications of "The""Dialectic of Sex" and make a compelling, critical case for its contemporary salience.

The national dancers of Uzbekistan are almost always female. In a society that has been Muslim for nearly seven hundred years, why and how did unveiled female dancers become a beloved national icon during the Soviet period? Also, why has their popularity continued after the Uzbek republic became independent? The author argues that dancers, as symbolic girls or unmarried females in the Uzbek kinship system, are effective mediators between extended kin groups, and the Uzbek nation-state. The female dancing body became a tabula rasa upon which the state inscribed, and reinscribed, constructions of Uzbek nationalism.

Doi describes the politics of gender in households as well as the dominant kinship idioms in Uzbek society. She traces the rise of national dance as a profession for women during the Soviet period, prior to which women wore veils and kept purdah. The final chapter examines emerging notions of Uzbek, as regional and national groups contest the notion through debates about what constitutes authentic Uzbek dance. Doi concludes with a comparative discussion of the power of marginality, which enabled Uzbeks to maintain a domain where Uzbek culture and history could be honored, within the Russocentric hegemony of the Soviet state.

The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active, interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood.

This work examines the system of co-ordination of national social security laws in the European Union from a gender perspective. The central question that it raises concerns the level of social security protection enjoyed by women moving throughout the Union in cases of work interruption or marriage dissolution. Women's social security protection has traditionally been based on two criteria, namely economic activity and family/marriage. Work interruptions, in particular for child-rearing, challenge the invocation of economic activity as an effective basis for social security rights. Changing social and family conditions, including the emergence of atypical relationships and increasing divorce rates, challenge the criterion of family/marriage. Efforts have been made within the framework of the national systems of the Member States to address these challenges, often unsuccessfully. So, how successful has the European system of co-ordination, the aim of which is to provide a sufficient level of protection to migrant workers and their families, been in addressing these challenges? The book contains comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon and legal institution of social security, as well as a thorough analysis of the current state of European Community law concerning co-ordination, with a particular focus on gender. It identifies several problematic areas where solutions must be worked out and action taken. The book fills a gap in the legal literature on the social security field and will appeal to those with an interest in social security, including academics, policy-makers and practitioners.

The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active, interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood.

Globalization poses new challenges for the modern welfare state and democracies. One controversial issue is how struggles for economic equality are linked with struggles for recognition of difference according to gender, ethnicity and sexuality. "The Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment" examines the political and academic debates about the inclusion or exclusion of women and marginalized social groups from different policy contexts. The focus is on the different class and gender regimes influencing the interplay of political, civil and social citizenship at different levels of politics.