The Gender/Sexuality Reader is a sophisticated survey of the best recent work in anthropology on the issues of gender and sexuality. The essays are diverse and engaging: colonial rule in Indonesia, the sexological legacy of scientific racism in Europe, eugenics in Singapore, the political-economic context of motherhood in Brazil.
Developing the insights of social constructionism this reader shows how gender, sexuality, and power are historically connected and practically intertwined.

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present.
"An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."--Lesley Gill, "News Politics"
"[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."--Jonathan Spencer, "Times Literary Supplement"
"In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred, ' have distorted American popular debate and social life."--Rachel Mattson, "Voice Literary Supplement"
"At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."--Matthew T. McGuire, "Boston Book Review"

Taking a novel anthropological approach to the issue of white ethnicity in the United States, this book challenges the model of uniform ethnic family and community culture, and argues for a reconsideration of the meaning of class, kinship, and gender in America's past and present. Micaela di Leonardo focuses on a group of Italian-American families who live in Northern California and who range widely in economic status. Combining the methods of participant-observation, oral history, and economic-historical research, she breaks decisively with the tradition of viewing white ethnicity solely as Eastern, urban, and working class.

The author integrates lively narrative accounts with analysis to give a fresh interpretation of ethnic identity as both materially grounded and individually negotiated. She examines the ways in which different occupational experiences influence individual choice of family or community as the unit of collective ethnic identity, and she considers the boundaries at which individuals, particularly women, work out their personal ethnic identities. Her analysis illuminates the political meanings that the images of ethnic woman and family have taken on in popular discourse.

A provocative study that sets the reflections of a broad range of Italian-Americans in the context of their varied life histories, this book provides an informed commentary on family, class, culture, and gender in American life.

"Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge" brings feminist anthropology up to date, highlighting the theoretical sophistication that characterizes recent research. Twelve essays by outstanding scholars, written with the volume's concerns specifically in mind, range across the broadest anthropological terrain, assessing and contributing to feminist work on biological anthropology, primate studies, global economy, new reproductive technologies, ethno-linguistics, race and gender, and more. The editor's introduction not only sets two decades of feminist anthropological work in the multiple contexts of changes in anthropological theory and practice, political and economic developments, and larger intellectual shifts, but also lays out the central insights feminist anthropology has to offer us in the postmodern era. The profound issues raised by the authors resonate with the basic interests of any discipline concerned with gender, that is, all of the social sciences and humanities.

Taking a novel anthropological approach to the issue of white ethnicity in the United States, this book challenges the model of uniform ethnic family and community culture, and argues for a reconsideration of the meaning of class, kinship, and gender in America's past and present. Micaela di Leonardo focuses on a group of Italian-American families who live in Northern California and who range widely in economic status. Combining the methods of participant-observation, oral history, and economic-historical research, she breaks decisively with the tradition of viewing white ethnicity solely as Eastern, urban, and working class.

The author integrates lively narrative accounts with analysis to give a fresh interpretation of ethnic identity as both materially grounded and individually negotiated. She examines the ways in which different occupational experiences influence individual choice of family or community as the unit of collective ethnic identity, and she considers the boundaries at which individuals, particularly women, work out their personal ethnic identities. Her analysis illuminates the political meanings that the images of ethnic woman and family have taken on in popular discourse.

A provocative study that sets the reflections of a broad range of Italian-Americans in the context of their varied life histories, this book provides an informed commentary on family, class, culture, and gender in American life.