This volume compares and contrasts concepts of gender from a wide range of perspectives drawn from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. The contributors examine the complex process of sexual differentiation in an attempt to determine how feminine and masculine are defined and how these definitions contribute to and influence perceptions of social reality in various disciplines. Their essays explore how gender roles are created and how they influence the American way of life in such embedded cultural mores as the romance novel, images of the Virgin Mary, male inmates, the American wedding, contemporary art and architecture, 19th-century patriarchy, economics, and natural science. This is a timely, important, and, above all, useful book that will provide students in women's studies and cultural studies with a solid introduction to central concepts and texts in gender studies, and give them an equally important sense of the multiplicity of methodologies.

"Angelika Bammer, Emory University"

This volume breaks important new ground in the rapidly growing field of gender studies by comparing and contrasting concepts of gender from a wide range of perspectives drawn from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. The contributors--each a specialist in his or her discipline as well as in the area of gender studies--examine the complex processes of sexual differentiation to determine how feminine and masculine are defined and how these definitions contribute to and influence perceptions of social reality in various disciplines. United by an overall focus on the importance of gender constructs in shaping cultural ideology and social interaction, the essays explore how gender roles are created and how they influence the American way of life in such embedded cultural mores as the romance novel, images of the Virgin Mary, male inmates, the American wedding, contemporary art, nineteenth-century patriarchy, economics, and natural science.

The essays are arranged so that disciplines and themes interralate--each essay enhances the previous work and introduces the next. Overall, the book is arranged into three systematic approaches to gender studies. Four papers explore the way art, literature, and ritual reflect gender beliefs and act as vehicles for their reinvention through time. Another set of essays more explicitly concerns the power that ideology has in recreating gender and associated beliefs and practices. Essays on nineteenth century patriarchy and on prison gender identities emphasize that both men and women must be viewed as products of their culture. A final group of essays deal with gender and prestige or power structures as they have influenced the intellectual development of various disciplines and the individuals who are trained in those disciplines. This section includes essays on the relationship between gender and science, gender roles in economics, feminist roles in religious studies, and the emergence of women in architecture. Taken together, these papers offer an important new focus for students and scholars involved in studying the pervasive influence of gender across disciplines.

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia, in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Clarke family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.

What is the "something in these hills" that ties mountain families to family land in the southern Appalachians? This ethnographic examination challenges contemporary theory and explores two interrelated themes: the duality of the southern Appalachians as both a menacing and majestic landscape and the emotional relationship to family land characteristic of long-term residents of these mountains. To most outsiders, the area conjures images of a beautiful yet dangerous place, typified by the movie Deliverance. To long-term residents, these mountains have a fundamental emotional hold so powerful that many mourn the sale or loss of family land as if it were a deceased relative. How can the same geographical space be both? Using a carefully crafted cultural lens, John M. Coggeshall explains how family land anthropomorphizes, metaphorically becoming another member of kin groups. He establishes that this emotional sense of place existed prior to recent land losses, as some contemporary scholars argue. Utilizing the voices and perspectives of long-term residents, the book provides readers with a more fundamental understanding of the "something in these hills" that holds people in place.

What is the "something in these hills" that ties mountain families to family land in the southern Appalachians? This ethnographic examination challenges contemporary theory and explores two interrelated themes: the duality of the southern Appalachians as both a menacing and majestic landscape and the emotional relationship to family land characteristic of long-term residents of these mountains. To most outsiders, the area conjures images of a beautiful yet dangerous place, typified by the movie Deliverance. To long-term residents, these mountains have a fundamental emotional hold so powerful that many mourn the sale or loss of family land as if it were a deceased relative. How can the same geographical space be both? Using a carefully crafted cultural lens, John M. Coggeshall explains how family land anthropomorphizes, metaphorically becoming another member of kin groups. He establishes that this emotional sense of place existed prior to recent land losses, as some contemporary scholars argue. Utilizing the voices and perspectives of long-term residents, the book provides readers with a more fundamental understanding of the "something in these hills" that holds people in place.

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia, in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the Clarke family and their friends and neighbors, chronicling their struggles through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the desegregation of the state. Through hours of interviews with Mable and her relatives, as well as friends and neighbors, Coggeshall presents an ethnographic history that allows a largely ignored community to speak and record their own history for the first time. This story sheds new light on the African American experience in Appalachia, and in it Coggeshall documents the community's 150-year history of resistance to white oppression, while offering a new way to understand the symbolic relationship between residents and the land they occupy, tying together family, memory, and narratives to explain this connection.

For over a century cotton production influenced the folklife of the Carolina Piedmont. In the wake of the reconstruction in the 1870s the Piedmont sprouted a number of industrial towns whose cotton mills utilized the area's inexpensive power, labor, and materials.Simultaneously. A system of tenant farming evolved, creating a class of improvised black and white farmers. Their interaction with small-town elites helped to create a distinctive culture that is the fascinating backdrop of this amiable book.
As is revealed here, the Piedmont's agricultural past shapes contemporary values and attitudes. Family, hospitality, conservatism, individuality, and an acceptance of slower pace typify the foothills culture in the western region of the Carolinas. They foster traits that color the folklore, the foodways, the domestic architecture.Proliferating in this region of American Southeast are many of the verbal and social characteristics that outsiders pronounce to be distinctively "southern" -the southern accent in its many variations, family reunions, flea-market shopping, camp meetings, and revivals.

This volume compares and contrasts concepts of gender from a wide range of perspectives drawn from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. The contributors examine the complex process of sexual differentiation in an attempt to determine how feminine and masculine are defined and how these definitions contribute to and influence perceptions of social reality in various disciplines. Their essays explore how gender roles are created and how they influence the American way of life in such embedded cultural mores as the romance novel, images of the Virgin Mary, male inmates, the American wedding, contemporary art and architecture, 19th-century patriarchy, economics, and natural science. This is a timely, important, and, above all, useful book that will provide students in women's studies and cultural studies with a solid introduction to central concepts and texts in gender studies, and give them an equally important sense of the multiplicity of methodologies.

"Angelika Bammer, Emory University"

This volume breaks important new ground in the rapidly growing field of gender studies by comparing and contrasting concepts of gender from a wide range of perspectives drawn from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. The contributors--each a specialist in his or her discipline as well as in the area of gender studies--examine the complex processes of sexual differentiation to determine how feminine and masculine are defined and how these definitions contribute to and influence perceptions of social reality in various disciplines. United by an overall focus on the importance of gender constructs in shaping cultural ideology and social interaction, the essays explore how gender roles are created and how they influence the American way of life in such embedded cultural mores as the romance novel, images of the Virgin Mary, male inmates, the American wedding, contemporary art, nineteenth-century patriarchy, economics, and natural science.

The essays are arranged so that disciplines and themes interralate--each essay enhances the previous work and introduces the next. Overall, the book is arranged into three systematic approaches to gender studies. Four papers explore the way art, literature, and ritual reflect gender beliefs and act as vehicles for their reinvention through time. Another set of essays more explicitly concerns the power that ideology has in recreating gender and associated beliefs and practices. Essays on nineteenth century patriarchy and on prison gender identities emphasize that both men and women must be viewed as products of their culture. A final group of essays deal with gender and prestige or power structures as they have influenced the intellectual development of various disciplines and the individuals who are trained in those disciplines. This section includes essays on the relationship between gender and science, gender roles in economics, feminist roles in religious studies, and the emergence of women in architecture. Taken together, these papers offer an important new focus for students and scholars involved in studying the pervasive influence of gender across disciplines.