Confrontation is a memoir based on real events. Set in the early nineties, it follows the journey of a child growing up in South Africa’s season of change.

But all is not as it seems – biologically, domestically, emotionally – three words that immediately takes shape like the head, neck and tail of a monster brooding beneath the bed. Domestic unrest casts a thick veil over a much greater problem.

“One of your greatest challenges in this world, my darling, would be men... It’s a shame because you think you’re the relationship type?” So-called advice from a friend who suggested being gay might be a better option than what she was contemplating. Not that she had a choice. She wasn’t entirely herself yet, and that was the problem.

Kirsty Steinberg is the pen name for the author. Confrontation is her debut work.

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity. Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered. In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions, pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art history.

In Belles and Poets, Julia Nitz analyzes the Civil War diary writing of eight white women from the U.S. South, focusing specifically on how they made sense of the world around them through references to literary texts. Nitz finds that many diarists incorporated allusions to poems, plays, and novels, especially works by Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets, in moments of uncertainty and crisis. While previous studies have overlooked or neglected such literary allusions in personal writings, regarding them as mere embellishments or signs of elite social status, Nitz reveals that these references functioned as codes through which women diarists contemplated their roles in society and addressed topics related to slavery, Confederate politics, gender, and personal identity. Nitz's innovative study of identity construction and literary intertextuality focuses on diaries written by the following women: Eliza Frances (Fanny) Andrews of Georgia (1840-1931), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut of South Carolina (1823-1886), Malvina Sara Black Gist of South Carolina (1842-1930), Sarah Ida Fowler Morgan of Louisiana (1842-1909), Cornelia Peake McDonald of Virginia (1822-1909), Judith White Brockenbrough McGuire of Virginia (1813-1897), Sarah Katherine (Kate) Stone of Louisiana (1841-1907), and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas of Georgia (1843-1907). These women's diaries circulated in postwar commemoration associations, and several saw publication. The public acclaim they received helped shape the collective memory of the war and, according to Nitz, further legitimized notions of racial supremacy and segregation. Comparing and contrasting their own lives to literary precedents and fictional role models allowed the diarists to process the privations of war, the loss of family members, and the looming defeat of the Confederacy. Belles and Poets establishes the extent to which literature offered a means of exploring ideas and convictions about class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the Civil War-era South. Nitz's work shows that literary allusions in wartime diaries expose the ways in which some white southern women coped with the war and its potential threats to their way of life.

Explores the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, ethnicity, and culture on women in the Global South, as well as the central roles of women in resisting colonial rule, and their foundational contributions to post-independence constitutional reform and nation building. For all the effort and attention women across the Global South receive from the international human rights community and from their own governments, human rights frameworks frequently fail to significantly improve the lives of these women or their communities. Taking Kenya as a case study, this book explores the reasons for this, emphasising the need to understand the effects of the legacy of local colonial and postcolonial histories on the production of gendered identities and power in modern Kenyan cultural and political life. Drawing on interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake Victoria in Kenya, the author examinestheir access to, and experiences of, civil and political rights and citizenship, beginning with the colonial encounter, following these legacies into modern times, and the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution. In four thematic chapters, Kenny discusses women as victims and objects of cultural violence, the myths of the sorority of African women, women as victims of political and state violence, and women as actors in national political processes. In revealing that international human rights interventions have in fact reproduced the very patterns, structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women's disenfranchisement and marginalization, the book provides new insights into the difficulties women face in accessing their rights and will be invaluable for scholars and NGOs working in developing states. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Guiding students step-by-step through the research process while simultaneously introducing a range of debates, challenges and tools that feminist scholars use, the second edition of this popular textbook provides a vital resource to those students and researchers approaching their studies from a feminist perspective. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the book covers everything from research design, analysis and presentation, to formulating research questions, data collection and publishing research. Offering the most comprehensive and practical guide to the subject available, the text is now also fully updated to take account of recent developments in the field, including participatory action research, new technologies and methods for working with big data and social media. Doing Feminist Research is required reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses taking a feminist approach to social science methodology, research design and methods. It is the ideal guide for all students and scholars carrying out feminist research, whether in the fields of international relations, political science, interdisciplinary international and global studies, development studies or gender and women's studies. New to this Edition: - New discussions of contemporary research methods, including participatory action research, survey research and technology, and methods for big data and social media. - Updated to reflect recent developments in feminist and gender theory, with references to the latest research examples and new boxes considering recent shifts in the social and political sciences. - Brand new boxed examples throughout covering topics including collaborations, femicide, negotiating changing research environments and the pros and cons of feminist participatory action research. - The text is now written in the first (authors) and second (readers) person making the text clearer, more consistent and inclusive from the reader point of view. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/doing-feminist-research-in-political-and-social-science. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost.

From popular humor writer and social media sensation Anna Lind Thomas comes the second book of charming and uproarious essays that capture our universal need for life to just slow down-we weren't ready for this! Anna Lind Thomas wants everyone to just calm down and give her a minute, okay? She's not ready for this! In fact, through her latest collection of laugh-out-loud essays, she'll prove she's never been ready for anything in her life. Adult decisions, marriage, parenting, crow's feet, large pores, skinny jeans--you name it, she ain't ready for it! Don't even get her started on that one time she appeared on national TV in a blazer two sizes too small because she thought she'd lose twenty pounds before the shoot. Good grief, she just wasn't ready! I'm Not Ready for This will give you the encouragement you need to: Embrace the unexpected aspects of life Appreciate the incredible power of vulnerability Let God push you forward, even if you feel like you're not ready Through her signature wit, charm, and painful relatability, Anna reminds us that no one's truly ready for anything--so we might as well go for it and see what happens. She bets it'll be real good--or at the very least, real funny.

The first collection of its kind, Transgender Marxism is a provocative and groundbreaking union of transgender studies and Marxist theory. Exploring trans lives and movements, the authors delve into the experience of surviving as transgender under capitalism. They explore the pressures, oppression and state persecution faced by trans people living in capitalist societies, their tenuous positions in the workplace and the home, and give a powerful response to right-wing scaremongering against 'gender ideology'. Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, these essays reveal the structure of antagonisms faced by gender non-conforming people within society. Looking at the history of transgender movements, Marxist interventions into developmental theory, psychoanalysis and workplace ethnography, the authors conclude that for trans liberation, capitalism must be abolished.