This volume explores the multiple intersections between rape culture, gender violence, and religion. Each chapter considers the ways that religious texts, theologies, and traditions engage with contemporary cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, gender violence, and rape culture. Particularly, they interrogate the multifaceted roles that religious texts and teachings can have in challenging, confirming, querying, or redefining socio-cultural understandings of rape culture and gender violence. Unique to this volume, authors explore the topic from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, theology, biblical studies, gender and queer studies, politics, modern history, art history, linguistics, religious studies, and English literature. Together, these interdisciplinary approaches resist the tendency to oversimplify the complexity of the connections between religion, gender violence, and rape culture; rather, the volume offers readers a multi-vocal and multi-perspectival view of this crucial subject, inviting readers to think deeply about it in light of the global crisis of gender violence.

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.

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.

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.

This book provides a fresh overview on the debate about the remarkable regression of gender equality in the Balkans and South Caucasus caused by the fall of socialism and by the revitalization of religion in Turkey. Contrary to the prevailing opinion of researchers who state continuous male domination, the book presents strong arguments for an alternative outlook. By contrasting the realia of gender relations with the utopia of new femininities and new masculinities driven by digital visual communication, the book provokingly concludes with the arrival of two utopias: the Marlboro Man - still authoritative but lonely - conquering and refusing family obligations; and with the emergence of a new femininity type - strong and beautiful. As such this book provides a great resource to anthropologists, demographers, sociologists, gender and media researchers and all those interested in feminist issues.

Rebel Friendships considers the interplay between individuals and their friendships with social movements. The intersections between individual and community, the ways we experiment with social change, explore, create, and reduce the harms of modern living are the work of social movements. Yet, the process is rarely simple. Through auto-ethnographic reflections of experiences with the Beats, ACT-UP, Occupy Wall Street, anti-consumer, queer rights, and non-polluting transportation movements Shepard explores the way friendship infuses social movements with the social capital necessary to move bodies of ideas forward. Such innovation is rarely seen in more institutionalized social arrangements. Rebel Friendships offers a new take on the ties between friends who are connected through affinity and efforts aimed at social change.

This book looks with hindsight at the Arab Spring and sheds light on the debates it triggered within North African societies and the alarming developments in women's rights. Although women played a key role in the success of the uprisings that wiped out long ruling oligarchies across the region, they remain excluded from decision-making circles and the formal political and electoral apparatus. Women's rights are written off constitution drafts, and issues of gender equality are hardly addressed. The chapters that compose this volume present research and reflections from different perspectives to help the reader get a better picture of the profound turmoil that beset this part of the so-called "Arab" World. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the contributors discuss a host of questions related to women and gender in the Arab world and address the broader question of why women's efforts and momentum during the revolution did not seem to pay off the same way they did for men. This book provides an assessment of the situation from the inside. It is intended to help the general public as well as the academic world comprehend the significance of what is going on in this key part of the Islamic World.

Meticulously researched, this book presents a fresh challenge to notions that women were ultimately beyond politics in nineteenth century Greece, by engaging with our very definitions of the terms politics, citizenship and 'public'. Analyzing the relationship between women and nationalism, and women and politics, the author traces the development of some of the most important norms which formed, and continue to shape our society. Ideas and beliefs that we now may regard as immutable, such as the definition of politics and gender, were novel some two hundred years ago. This new history of women's lives, aspirations and choices in Greece demonstrates the relativity of such value, in order to examine the question of what constitutes 'politics' and so understand where we stand, how we got there, and how we might change.

Histories of Sexology: Between Science and Politics takes an interdisciplinary and reflexive approach to the historiography of sexology. Drawing on an intellectual history perspective informed by recent developments in science and technology studies and political history of science, this book examines specific social, cultural, intellectual, scientific and political contexts that have given shape to theories of sexuality, but also to practices in medicine, psychology, education and sexology. Furthermore, it explores various ways that theories of sexuality have both informed and been produced by sexologies-as scientific and clinical discourses about sex-in Western countries since the 19th century.

According to a 1992 World Health Organization report, more than 100 million couples throughout the world make love on any given day. Every moment, lovers are locked in passion, compelled by a natural urge driving all peoples in all centuries. And yet this same natural desire has all too often been regarded as a dangerous force and even branded as obscene. Religious taboos have tainted sex with guilt and punishment. Earlier in this century, artists could be imprisoned for portraying sex. Today, despite two decades of easing restrictions on sexual expression and greater freedom for the practice of non-traditional lifestyles, religious fundamentalists and other extremists seek to turn back the clock, advocating prosecution of any whom they regard as sexually subversive or exploitative, and recommending strict censorship of artistic or literary expressions of erotic emotion. The Art of Lovemaking: An Illustrated Tribute is a spirited rebuttal to those crying for renewed censorship. In this sumptuous volume, James Haught brings together the works of many modern and classic artists to show that the depiction of love and desire is not only alive and well but an important theme in art, both in the East and West, throughout the ages. While styles differ and artistic conventions vary, the same message shines through: that love is beautiful and therefore ought to be looked at and enjoyed, not regarded as shameful. The Art of Lovemaking, intended for the private pleasure of adult couples, may be perused solely for its sensual loveliness. But its purpose is also to refute three unhealthy calumnies: the puritanical axiom that sex itself is dirty, the ultrafeminist contention that any portrayal of sexdegrades women, and the vulgar notion that reduces all erotic art to the level of pornography. These fallacious views must retreat before the simple honesty of major artists depicting lovers as affectionate equals. In his superb introduction, Russell Vannoy discusses various philosophical and cultural approaches to sexuality and the problems of trying to formulate a single, hence exclusive, definition of sexual love.

This book explores the role and centrality of women in the development of collaborative theatre practice, alongside the significance of collective creation and devising in the development of the modern theatre. Tracing a web of women theatremakers in Europe and North America, this book explores the connections between early twentieth century collective theatre practices such as workers theatre and the dramatic play movement, and the subsequent spread of theatrical devising. Chapters investigate the work of the Settlement Houses, total theatre in 1920s' France, the mid-century avant-garde and New Left collectives, the nomadic performances of Europe's transnational theatre troupes, street-theatre protests, and contemporary devising. In so doing, the book further elucidates a history of modern theatre begun in A History of Collective Creation (2013) and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (2013), in which the seemingly marginal and disparate practices of collective creation and devising are revealed as central-and women theatremakers revealed as progenitors of these practices.

This book offers critical reflections on the intersections between criminology and queer scholarship, and charts future directions for this field. Since their development over twenty-five years ago, queer scholarship and politics have been hotly contested fields, equally embraced and dismissed. Amid calls for criminology and criminal justice institutions to respond more effectively to the injustices faced by LGBTIQ people, criminologists have recently developed a Queer Criminology and turned to queer scholarship in the process. Through a sweeping analysis of critical criminologies, as well as issues as varied as shame and utopian thought, Matthew Ball points to the many opportunities for criminology to engage further with the more politically disruptive strands of queer scholarship. His analysis highlights that criminology and queer theory are 'dangerous bedfellows', and that navigating the tension between them is central to confronting the social and criminal injustices experienced by LGBTIQ communities. This book will be of particular interest for scholars of criminology, criminal justice, LGBTIQ studies, gender studies and critical theory.

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 book draws upon empirical data to offer a fresh and unique perspective on hate crime victimisation, using transphobic hate crime as a case study. It adopts the lens of 'visibility' as a way of understanding hate crime victimisation and to challenge dominant theoretical and conceptual perspectives of hate crime. In adopting this lens, key aspects of victimisation are explored, including the hierarchical nature of hate crime victimisation that afford visibility to particular types of victimisation and to particular groups of people to make them 'legitimate' victims. In challenging these notions, this book highlights the pervasive, everyday nature of much hate crime and introduces the concept of 'micro-crimes' as a way to conceptualise the nature of victimisation that is often overshadowed by discussions around 'microaggressions' and more socially recognisable forms of 'hate crime'. Key ideas relating to space, place and identity performance are drawn upon throughout these analyses and discussions to provide a nuanced overview and conceptualisation of hate crime victimisation.

Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Throughout history, it has played a crucial role in defining gender roles and identities. This collection offers an in-depth thematic examination of this relationship between humor and gender, spanning a variety of historical and cultural backdrops.

Written in the aftermath of Indonesia's anti-queer panic in 2016, this book tells the story of local queer movements in challenging the heteronormative society and resisting the homophobic hostility from religious conservative groups and the state. The year 2016 was a touchstone moment for queer issues in Indonesia, marked by the ubiquity of anti-queer campaigns, along with the pervasive use of the term 'LGBT' in public. Drawing on historical archives and his engagements with local queer activisms, Hendri Yulius Wijaya traces the historical shifts of gender and sexual identities in Indonesia, from gay and lesbian, to LGBT, to SOGIE minorities, while exploring their connections with the country's socio-political circumstances and the globalization of queer rights. Using a strategic blend of queer theory and assemblage framework, Wijaya demonstrates how activists refashion transnational sexuality discourses to balance international developments of queer rights against the contingencies of daily life in Indonesia. Equally importantly, he sheds light on emerging practices in activist landscapes, including the emergence of sexuality experts and the professionalization of activisms. In analyzing the rising tide of homophobic paranoia, Wijaya further shows how the current anti-queer campaigns have branched out into a broader assault on feminism and promoted a form of 'aversion therapy' that positions same-sex attraction as a divine ordeal. Intimate Assemblages follows the travails of queer activists in defining what it means to be queer in contemporary Indonesia.

At a moment in which America seems simultaneously more closed and more open to change than ever before, Sons and Daughters of Self-Made Men: Improvising Gender, Place, Nation in American Literature re-examines a defining national discourse. Exploring the dilemmas of U.S. subjects positioned as inheritors-and thus as children-of the archetypal self-made Founder/Father, the author offers a critical re-evaluation of the trope of self-making as it is expressed in modern and contemporary American literature. She views "self-making" as a mode of simultaneous constriction and possibility, where the compulsion to perform to the national script leads to critical and creative forms of improvisation. In texts by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Edgar Wideman, and others, she finds self-making re-articulated with improvisational differences that suggest possibilities for an improvisational nation.

Set against the backdrop of a country which upholds a heteronormative and narrow view of family, this book provides insights into the lives of Hungarian same-sex couples and their heterosexual relatives. Beres-Deak utilizes the theoretical framework of intimate citizenship, as well as findings from ethnographic interviews, participant observation and online sources. Instead of emphasizing the divide between non-heterosexual people and their heterosexual kin, the author recognizes that these members of queer families share many similar experiences and challenges.Queer Families in Hungary looks at experiences of coming out, negotiation of visibility, and kinship practices, and offers valuable insights into how individuals and families can resist heterosexist constraints through their discourses and practices. Students and scholars researching kinship studies, LGBT and queer studies, post-socialist studies, and citizenship studies, will find this book of interest.

Sexing Political Culture in the History of France gathers together several compelling essays that nuance older studies about how gender and sexual symbols stand in for the nation in its various incarnations from the Early Modern period to the present. By combining a long historical trajectory with detailed analyses of how the state or its opponents have used symbolic meaning to mobilize political action, clarify or criticize hierarchy, or simply make sense of social norms, these essays demonstrate the distinctive power of such symbolism and thus of this area of focus, which traverses intellectual, social, cultural history as well as the history of gender and sexuality. This is a cutting-edge collection that moves coherently from the early modern witch hunt to race in postcolonial France. - Carolyn J. Dean, John Hay Professor of International Studies, Brown University.

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.

Causal explanations are essential for theory building. In focusing on causal mechanisms rather than descriptive effects, the goal of this volume is to increase our theoretical understanding of the way gender operates in interaction. Theoretical analyses of gender's effects in interaction, in turn, are necessary to understand how such effects might be implicated with individual-level and social structural-level processes in the larger system of gender inequality. Despite other differences, the contributors to this book all take what might be loosely called a "microstructural" approach to gender and interaction. All agree that individuals come to interaction with certain common, socially created beliefs, cultural meanings, experiences, and social rules. These include stereotypes about gendered activities and skills, beliefs about the status value of gender, rules for interacting in certain settings, and so on. However, as individuals apply these beliefs and rules to the specific contingent events of interaction, they combine and reshape their implications in distinctive ways that are particular to the encounter. As a result, individuals actively construct their social relations in the encounter through their interaction. The patterns of relations that develop are not completely determined or scripted in advance by the beliefs and rules of the larger society. Consequently, there is a reciprocal causal relationship between constructed patterns of interaction and larger social structural forms. The constructed patterns of social relations among a set of interactants can be thought of as micro-level social structures or, more simply, "microstructures.

countries in this region have been particularly limited (for an exception to this, see Petmesidou & Papatheodorou, 2006). The underlying assumption in this volume is that despite the diversity of welfare states bordering the Mediterranean Sea, some interesting commonalities are shared by these nations. Indeed, in his contribution to this volume Gal has described these nations as belonging to an extended family of welfare states that share some common characteristics and outcomes, one of which is the role of the family. By bringing together case analyses of the welfare states in the Mediterranean which focus on children, gender, and families, we maintain that it is possible to shed light on aspects of social policy that do not necessarily emerge in most discussions of these issues in the literature. The rationale inherent in a volume that focuses on a group of welfare states is of course embedded in the welfare regime typology notion that has dominated much of the comparative social policy literature over the last two decades. The publication of Esping Andersen's seminal work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 (and his related 1999 book), which distinguished between three welfare regimes, became a landmark for comparative work of social policies in various countries. Esping-Andersen regarded his typology as a useful tool for comparison between welfare states because it allowed "for greater analytical parsimony and help s] us to see the forest rather than myriad trees" (1999, p. 73).

Researchers recognize that theoretical frameworks and models of child development and family dynamics have historically overlooked the ways in which developmental processes are shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Ecological and acculturation frameworks are especially central to understanding the experiences of immigrant populations, and current research has yielded new conceptual and methodological tools for documenting the cultural and developmental processes of children and their families. Within this broad arena, a question of central importance is on how gender roles in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and families. Gender Roles in Immigrant Families places gender at the forefront of the research by investigating how it interplays with parental roles, parent-child relationships, and child outcomes.

First published in 1992, Sexual Sameness examines the differing textual strategies male and female writers have developed to celebrate homosexuality. Examining such writers as E.M. Forster, James Baldwin, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Audre Lourde, this wide-ranging book demonstrates how literature has been one of the few cultural spaces in which sexual outsiders have been able to explore forbidden desires. From the humiliating trials of Oscar Wilde to the appalling stigmatisation of people living with AIDS, Sexual Sameness reveals the persistent homophobia that has until recently almost completely inhibited our understanding of lesbian and gay writing. In opening up homosexual literature to informed and objective methods of reading, Sexual Sameness will be of interest to a large lesbian and gay readership, as well as to students of gender studies, literary studies and the social sciences.