Vulnerable yet tough, she eventually ended up a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. It took time and incredible resilience, but finally, with the help of a local church community, she broke free of her pimp and her past. Three years later, Lloyd arrived in the United States to work with adult women in the sex industry and soon founded her own nonprofit— GEMS, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services—to meet the needs of other girls with her history. She also earned her GED and won full scholarships to college and a graduate program. Today Lloyd is executive director of GEMS in New York City and has turned it into one of the nation's most groundbreaking nonprofit organizations. In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark, secretive world of her past in stunning cinematic detail. And, with great humanity, she lovingly shares the stories of the girls whose lives she has helped—; small victories that have healed her wounds and made her whole. Revelatory, authentic, and brave, Girls Like Us is an unforgettable memoir.

    The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.

    As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own". In 'teaching my mother how to give birth', Warsan's debut pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

    In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman’s developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.

    Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

    The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.

    We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."—The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change—and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind. Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic. Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide. Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

    As a young woman, Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action, propelled by her realization that it is women who suffer most during conflicts--and that the power of women working together can create an unstoppable force. In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia's ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace.--From publisher description.

    prisons are routinely subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse. While this has been documented in male prisons, women in prison often suffer in relative anonymity. Women Inside addresses this critical social justice issue, empowering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to share the stories that have previously been silenced. Among the narrators:•Irma Rodriguez, in prison on drug charges. While in prison in 1990, Irma was diagnosed HIV positive, but after a decade and a half of aggressive and toxic treatment, Irma learned that she never had HIV.•Sheri Dwight, a domestic violence survivor who was sent to prison for attempting to kill her batterer. While in prison, she underwent surgery for abdominal pain and learned more than four years later that she had been sterilized without her consent.

    For the first time, Dear Zari allows these women to tell their stories in their own words: from the child bride given as payment to end of a family feud, to a life spent in a dark, dusty room weaving carpets, from a young girl being brought up as a boy, to a woman living as a widow shunned by society. Intimate, emotional, painful and uplifting, these stories uncover the suffering and strength of women in this deeply religious and intensely traditional society, and show how their courage is an inspiration to women everywhere.

    barrio to Hollywood is as close as a short drive on the 101 freeway, but the cultural divide is enormous. Born to Mexican-born and American-naturalized parents, Alicia Armendariz migrated a few miles west to participate in the free-range birth of the 1970s punk movement. Alicia adopted the punk name Alice Bag, and became lead singer for The Bags, early punk visionaries who starred in Penelope Spheeris' documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.Here is a life of many crossed boundaries, from East L.A.'s musica ranchera to Hollywood's punk rock; from a violent male-dominated family to female-dominated transgressive rock bands. Alice's feminist sympathies can be understood by the name of her satiric all-girl early Goth band Castration Squad.Violence Girl takes us from a violent upbringing to an aggressive punk sensibility; this time a difficult coming-of-age memoir culminates with a satisfying conclusion, complete with a happy marriage and children. Nearly a hundred excellent photographs energize the text in remarkable ways.Alice Bag's work and influence can be seen this year in the traveling Smithsonian exhibition "American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music."

    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    But Junia's tragedy is not hers alone. She's joined by fellow women in the Bible whose stories of bold leadership have been overlooked. She's in the company of visionary women of God throughout the centuries whose names we've forgotten, whose stories go untold, and whose witness we neglect to celebrate.But Junia is also joined by women today--women who are no longer silent and who are experiencing a re-voicing as they respond to God's call to lead us into all truth. (Patheos Press)

    This all but shuts women out from contributing to God’s kingdom as they were designed to do. Furthermore, the plight of women in the Majority World demands a Christian response, a holistic embrace of all that God calls women and men to be in his world. The loudest voices speaking into women’s lives in the twenty-first century thus far come from either fundamentalist Islam or radical feminism. And neither can be allowed to carry the day. The Bible contains the highest possible view of women and invests women’s lives with cosmic significance regardless of their age, stage of life, social status, or culture. Carolyn Custis James unpacks three transformative themes the Bible presents to women that raise the bar for women and calls them to join their brothers in advancing God’s gracious kingdom on earth. These new images of what can be in Christ free women to embrace the life God gives them, no matter what happens. Carolyn encourages readers with a positive, kingdom approach to the changes, challenges, and opportunities facing women throughout the world today.

    While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

    Cindy writes her zine like she is figuring out the human condition. She makes writing about the simplest and most common things--playing music, childhood, cooking, or sex--resonate with universal understanding. She helps us make sense of more complex things like the satisfaction from doing useful work, natural curiosity, the ability to use logic, gender dynamics, introspection, the need for challenge and change, combating depression and creating art and literature. She shares and explores the emotions involved with having an abortion, rape, dealing with the death of family, or sexual harassment in a context that is enlightening and personal, feeling like a close friend opening up to you. What's most impressive though is that she relates these things into every article in her zine seamlessly.

    Estés. "She wears hundreds of costumes, dozens of skin tones, is patroness of deserts, mountains, stars and oceans. Thus she comes to us in billions of images, but at her center, she is the Great Immaculate Heart." With Untie the Strong Woman, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés invites us to reconnect with "the fierce and loving Blessed Mother who is friendly, but never tame—she who flies to our aid when the road is long and our hearts are broken, ever ready to rekindle the inner fire of our creative souls." In her first book in more than a decade, Dr. Estés illuminates Our Lady through blessings, images, and narrative, including:* Stories of connecting with the Blessed Mother, including "Meeting the Lady in Red" and "Untie the Strong Woman";* Blessed Mother's many images from around the world, including "Litany of The Mother Road: A Chant of Her Incandescent Names", "A Man Named Mary", and "The Marys of Mother Africa";* The wild side of her love, including "Massacre of the Dreamers", "The Maiz Mother", "Holy Card of Swords Through the Heart", and "Guadalupe is a Girl Gang Leader in Heaven"."The Blessed Mother is often 'Friend to the friendless one' and Mother to all—yet too many of us have been estranged from her for far too long." Untie the Strong Woman opens a channel to this sacred and nurturing force—"breaking through walls that have held us back from her presence, and instead, inviting us to shelter under her starry green mantle."

    actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

    And they raise the question: can women’s access to public space be viewed in isolation from that of other marginal groups?Going beyond the problem of the real and implied risks associated with women’s presence in public, they draw from feminist theory to argue that only by celebrating loitering—a radical act for most Indian women—can a truly equal, global city be created.

    Johtje Vos, a Dutch housewife, hid Jews in her home and repeatedly outsmarted the Gestapo. Law student Hannie Schaft became involved in the most dangerous resistance work--sabotage, weapons transference, and assassinations. In these pages, young readers will meet these and many other similarly courageous women and girls who risked their lives to help defeat the Nazis.            Twenty-six engaging and suspense-filled stories unfold from across Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, and the United States, providing an inspiring reminder of women and girls’ refusal to sit on the sidelines around the world and throughout history.An overview of World War II and summaries of each country’s entrance and involvement in the war provide a framework for better understanding each woman’s unique circumstances, and resources for further learning follow each profile. Women Heroes of World War II is an invaluable addition to any student’s or history buff’s bookshelf.

    The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

    We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. Millions Like Us tells the story of how these women loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ... 'Vividly entertaining, uplifting and humbling, Millions Like Us deserves to be a bestseller' Bel Mooney, The Daily Mail 'Passionate, fascinating, profoundly sympathetic' Artemis Cooper, Evening Standard Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and grew up in Yorkshire and Sussex. She studied at Cambridge University and lived abroad in France and Italy, then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television. Her books include the acclaimed social history Among the Bohemians - Experiments in Living 1900-1939, and Singled Out - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, both published by Penguin in 2002 and 2007. She is married to a writer, has three children and lives in Sussex.

    Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century.Moraga considers decade-defining public events such as 9/11 and the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and she explores socioeconomic, cultural, and political phenomena closer to home, sharing her fears about raising her son amid increasing urban violence and the many forms of dehumanization faced by young men of color. Moraga describes her deepening grief as she loses her mother to Alzheimer’s; pays poignant tribute to friends who passed away, including the sculptor Marsha Gómez and the poets Alfred Arteaga, Pat Parker, and Audre Lorde; and offers a heartfelt essay about her personal and political relationship with Gloria Anzaldúa.Thirty years after the publication of Anzaldúa and Moraga’s collection This Bridge Called My Back, a landmark of women-of-color feminism, Moraga’s literary and political praxis remains motivated by and intertwined with indigenous spirituality and her identity as Chicana lesbian. Yet aspects of her thinking have changed over time. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness reveals key transformations in Moraga’s thought; the breadth, rigor, and philosophical depth of her work; her views on contemporary debates about citizenship, immigration, and gay marriage; and her deepening involvement in transnational feminist and indigenous activism. It is a major statement from one of our most important public intellectuals.

    Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.

    They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies. Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examines the hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice. In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. She places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism

    Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race—commonly seen as biological in the medical world—is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the “medicalization” of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.

    Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women’s rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party’s leading theorists of black women’s exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.

    As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities.Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.

    Rarely has a book about lust been full of so much love, conflict, and intelligence. If you think you already know what's in these stories, or you think you don't need to know, you're wrong."—Patrick Califa, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of TransgenderismExploring the crossroads of gender and sexuality, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary offers unusually engaging narratives that create a raw and honest depiction of dating, sex, love, and relationships among members of the gender variant community. FTM, MTF, thirdgender, genderqueer, and other non-traditional identities beyond the gender binary of traditional male and female are included in this often heartwarming, occasionally heartbreaking, always heartfelt groundbreaking anthology. From monogamous love and marriage to anonymous sex and one-night hook-ups (and everything in between), these stories offer readers insight into the precarious emotional and practical mechanics of intimacy among gender-variant experiences.Features contributions from award-winning authors including Julia Serano, Sassafras Lowery, and Max Valerio, alongside outstanding new writing by Tribe 8 guitarist and acclaimed film director Silas Howard, activist Joelle Ruby Ryan, filmmaker Ashley Altadonna, SisterSpit alum Cooper Lee Bombardier, and many other unique and talented voices.

    They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

    Is it the covers? Is it because the audience and authors are largely comprised of women? Or is it something else? Perhaps the bad reputation of romance has to do with surprising dictionary definitions, women, window taxes, the poor, the cost of a ream of paper in the nineteenth century, the rise of the love match marriage, the social status quo, the industrial revolution, and the ongoing tension between high and low art. Discover the origins of the stigma against popular romance novels, those who read it and those who wrote it. It has nothing to do with the covers. These books were scorned because they were dangerous.

    It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression—including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs—to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways.

    Friedman decries the hypocrisy and mixed messages of our culture (we’re failures if we don’t act sexy, but we’re sluts if we actually pursue sex; we need to be protected from rapists lurking in bushes, but deserve “whatever we get” if we have a drink at a party and wear a skirt), and encourages readers to separate fear from fact, decode the damaging messages all around them, and discover a healthy personal sexuality.Educational and interactive, What You Really Really Want includes revealing quizzes, creative exercises, and reality-based advice about sex and sexuality today. With Friedman’s informed advice to guide them, readers will build new skills for safely expressing their sexuality with lovers and explore effective ways to talk about tricky issues with family and friends—and learn how to make the world a little safer for everyone else’s sexuality along the way.

    This book looks at the struggles of Israeli women against this religious and political intrusion. Leading Jewish women's activist and columnist Elana Sztokman investigates their increasing oppression recently, including gender segregation on buses; erasing their faces in newspapers and ads; the silencing of women's voices in the army; and prominent female politicians being barred from conference and events. Blending interviews with original investigative research, Sztokman presents a portrait of this alarming reality and proposes ideas for creating a more egalitarian vision of religious culture in Israeli society.

    This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy’s narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called “the sex war” is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy’s early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy’s place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

    In the chapbook he is made when a father dies. He is a kind of child idea, a child born into fiction,” Hinton says of her own creation within the narrative walls of I Don’t Respect Female Expression.Can men and women ever truly understand each other? At our best social moments we come to claim victory by only grasping at the patterns of our sexual opposites. In the grand scheme we stumble clueless. Hinton seeks to get past that, all the while enjoying the juxtaposition of female power and female powerlessness as they stand as a cage and weapon mixed together, a modern cocktail.

    Presenting real-life, first-person scenarios from young, female pastors in a variety of denominations, church sizes and ministries, this book is intended for young women in ministry, as well as those considering a ministerial calling. This is the first in a new series of books from our collaboration with The Young Clergy Women Project. The series will feature writing from young adult clergy women on topics that give meaning to their lives and ministries.

    Gailey's abiding interest in female heroes and tales of transformation, love, and loss bristles to life with a cast of characters including wives who become foxes, sisters who become birds, and robots with souls.

    When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s. Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is "to the revolution”---to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army. At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement.By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era---ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives---with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the 70s, and for those who weren’t around but still ask, "What was it like?", Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today.With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.

    This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people.

    This experiment in writing in extremis explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and Bellamy's confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. What is personal, what is public? In the electronic age, can anybody tell the difference? the buddhist celebrates marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. The Allone Co. Edition contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line. Designed by Wayne Smith.

    

    Sister Species asks readers to rethink how they view "others," how they affect animals with their daily choices, and how they might bring change for all who are abused. These essays remind readers that women have always been important to social justice and animal advocacy, and they urge each of us to recognize the links that continue to bind all oppressed individuals. The astonishing honesty of these contributors demonstrates with painful clarity why every woman should be an animal activist and why every animal activist should be a feminist. Contributors are Carol J. Adams, Tara Sophia Bahna-James, Karen Davis, Elizabeth Jane Farians, Hope Ferdowsian, Linda Fisher, Twyla François, Christine Garcia, A. Breeze Harper, Sangamithra Iyer, Pattrice Jones, Lisa Kemmerer, Allison Lance, Ingrid Newkirk, Lauren Ornelas, and Miyun Park.

    Only on such rare occasions as Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, John Boorman's Deliverance and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill has the rape-revenge movie transcended what is commonly assumed to be its intrinsically regressive nature.

    Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Memoir. In this bold and energetic debut, temporal malapropisms become purposeful play through Tamayo's poetics of code switching and homophonics. As Tamayo tackles the frustrations of the transnational immigrant experience, language "mistakes" become "missed aches" and she writes mother and mother-tongue into one as "mouth her." A red thread intrudes throughout this frenetic mixed-genre assemblage, suturing identity to the page by erasing text, embroidering images, and stitching collage together. Cathy Park Hong, 2010 Gatewood Prize judge, promises the "brash, political, and bracingly original" [RED MISSED ACHES] will "startle you awake and demand your attention."

    From a womanist perspective, social and ecological change is necessarily undergirded by spirituality - as distinct from religion per se - which invokes a metaphysically informed approach to activism.

    Covers her birth and upbringing in India, her graduate studies in the US, and her aerospace engineering career culminating in her selection into the NASA astronaut corps in 1995. Details her astronaut training and two shuttle flights, STS-87 in 1997, and the ill-fated STS-107 in 2003. Written by her husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison.

    Women Religious from 2009-2011. Given the unmistakable imputation of guilt, the launch of this investigation was troubling to many women religious. Schneiders uses this occasion to articulate anew the meaning of Religious Life, the biblical theology underlying it, the reasons for the renewal undertaken after Vatican II, and the forms of apostolic Religious Life that have developed through this renewal. While her introduction tells the story of the investigation and the response it has generated, the following essays offer an eloquent and inspiring assessment and apologia for Religious Life today and in the future. It is a book addressed to all members of the church, calling us to live our faith in a spirit of integrity, freedom, and courage.

    Sylvia was the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and younger sister of Christabel. She was also the rebel in the family and stood alongside her married lover, Keir Hardie, when he formed the Labour Party. When he died, she started travelling – in Moscow, she reprimanded Lenin about his view of Communism, became lovers with an Italian revolutionary and bore his son when she was 45. She fought for Ethiopian independence and was given a state funeral after her death in 1960, in recognition of her importance to the Ethiopian cause. Fifty-four years later, a member of the House of Lords is campaigning for a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst to be erected opposite the Houses of Parliament, a long-deserved recognition of the importance of this rebellious Suffragette. Update of Shirley Harrison’s definitive study of the famous Suffragette, first published in 2004 but now with a new, original foreword by Sylvia Pankhurst’s son, Richard, updated text, interviews and all new images. Quotes and comments about Sylvia Pankhurst: * Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘that Scarlet woman’ * George Bernard Shaw – ‘queerest idiot genius of this age’ * Hitler had her on an arrest list for when he invaded Britain * Mussolini was watching her activities * Lenin – ‘Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst’s... wrong’ * Headline Daily Express, 1920 – ‘Sylvia’s World Revolution’ * Foreign Officer papers – ‘Sylvia Pankhurst is a blister’

    Challenging characterizations of Darwin’s work as a form of genetic determinism, Grosz shows that his writing reveals an insistence on the difference between natural selection and sexual selection, the principles that regulate survival and attractiveness, respectively. Sexual selection complicates natural selection by introducing aesthetic factors and the expression of individual will, desire, or pleasure. Grosz explores how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection transforms philosophy, our understanding of humanity in its male and female forms, our ideas of political relations, and our concepts of art. Connecting the naturalist’s work to the writings of Bergson, Deleuze, and Irigaray, she outlines a postmodern Darwinism that understands all of life as forms of competing and coordinating modes of openness. Although feminists have been suspicious of the concepts of nature and biology central to Darwin’s work, Grosz proposes that his writings are a rich resource for developing a more politicized, radical, and far-reaching feminist understanding of matter, nature, biology, time, and becoming.

    Carrellas’s trailblazing perspective melds spiritually fulfilling sex with today’s inclusionary sex positivism. This self-standing, spiral-bound easel book includes 65 holistic practices from Urban Tantra, such as “Firebreath Orgasm” and “Erotic Awakening Massage,” plus five new exercises for finding sexual and spiritual bliss. Carrellas also shares techniques for expanded orgasmic states and solo and partner play. With sections on Tantra for one, Tantra for two, and Tantra for the adventurous, this book will appeal to both Tantric virgins and fans of the original book looking for a beautiful new format for easy display. Going above and beyond typical position-a-day sex manuals, Urban Tantra Essentials guides readers to sensual new heights in sex and spirit.

    An expert in pastoral ministry illuminates the good news of healing and liberation the Bible offers survivors of sexual abuse.

    Clays Beneath the Skies collects seven stories of the Jokka of Ke Bakil, an alien species with two chances at puberty to change sexes: female, neuter or male… a species crushed between the harshness of their world and the imperatives of biology. Whether it’s creating a new religion or choosing to accept the hand of a strange male in a dance, each Jokkad makes sense of its world in its own way. Seven voices. Seven choices. A completely alien world. Come explore. Includes the Strange Horizon’s Reader’s Choice story “Unspeakable,” the Tiptree Reading List story “Freedom, Spiced and Drunk," "New Stories, " "A Trifold Spiral Knot," "Money for Sorrow, Made Joy, "His Neuter Face" and "Fire in the Void." Backmatter includes a chronology and glossary. With special foreword by Hugo Award-winning editor Susan Marie Groppi.

    The book seeks to rekindle the criticism of religion as the founding ideology of patriarchy.Focusing on the three monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this book examines common anti-women attitudes such as 'male-headship', impurity of women, the need to control women's bodies, and their modern manifestations in multicultural Western states. It points to the incorporation of religious law into legal systems, faith schools, and campaigns led by Christian and Islamic organisations against women's rights at the U.N., and explains how religious rights threaten to subvert women's rights. Including highly-topical chapters on the burka and the covering of women, and polygamy, this text questions the ideology of multiculturalism which shields religion from criticism by demanding respect for culture and faith, whilst ignoring the harm that women suffer from religion.Man's Dominion is an incisive and polemic text that will be of interest to students of gender studies, religion, and politics.

    When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others seem so effortlessly to enjoy.In this eloquently argued, psychologically informed book, Mari Ruti portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate--an experience that helps us encounter the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important as its triumphs, and sometimes love succeeds because it fails. At the heart of Ruti's argument is a meditation on interpersonal ethics that acknowledges the inherent opacity of human interiority and the difficulty of taking responsibility for what we cannot fully understand.Yet the fact that humans are often irrational in love does not absolve us of ethical accountability. In Ruti's view, we must work harder to map the unconscious patterns motivating our romantic behavior. As opposed to popular spiritual approaches urging us to live fully in the now, Ruti treats the past as a living component of the present. Only when we catch ourselves at those moments when the past speaks in the present can we keep ourselves from hurting the ones we love. Equally important, Ruti emphasizes transcending our individual histories of pain, an act that allows us to face the unconscious demons that dictate our relational choices. Written with substance and compassion, The Summons of Love restores the enlivening and transformative possibilities of romance.

    But, Leigh Goodmark argues, the resulting system is deeply flawed in ways that prevent it from assisting many women subjected to abuse. The current legal response to domestic violence is excessively focused on physical violence; this narrow definition of abuse fails to provide protection from behaviors that are profoundly damaging, including psychological, economic, and reproductive abuse. The system uses mandatory policies that deny women subjected to abuse autonomy and agency, substituting the state's priorities for women's goals.A Troubled Marriage is a provocative exploration of how the legal system's response to domestic violence developed, why that response is flawed, and what we should do to change it. Goodmark argues for an anti-essentialist system, which would define abuse and allocate power in a manner attentive to the experiences, goals, needs and priorities of individual women. Theoretically rich yet conversational, A Troubled Marriage imagines a legal system based on anti-essentialist principles and suggests ways to look beyond the system to help women find justice and economic stability, engage men in the struggle to end abuse, and develop community accountability for abuse.

    To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic.Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.

    Seeing Gertrude Stein, the companion book to an exhibition of the same name, illuminates less familiar aspects of her life. Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer analyze the portraits for which Stein posed, the domestic settings she created with Alice B. Toklas, her partner, and the signature styles of dress the two women adopted. Corn and Latimer also explore Stein’s engagement with multiple art forms and the bonds she formed with younger artists. Focusing on portraits in a range of media, photo essays, press clippings, snapshots, clothing, furniture, and other visual artifacts, this pathbreaking study reveals Stein’s sophistication in shaping her public image and cultural legacy. Lavishly illustrated throughout, these “five stories” represent Stein’s life on a human scale while tracing her influence on a wide variety of visual artists of her own and subsequent generations.

    Through an authentic voice, funny stories alternate between warming and saddening your soul. It's a queer love story. But it's also got no shortage of shame, violence, and Barbie envy. It's about the pretty people she used to know in California—the people she wanted to be but never quite felt she was. "How was I to know that all the pretty people got their answers from TV?"

    Barnett are widely acclaimed for their analyses of women, men, and society. In The Truth About Girls and Boys, they tackle a new, troubling trend in the theorizing of gender: that the learning styles, brain development, motivation, cognitive and spatial abilities, and "natural" inclinations of girls and boys are so fundamentally different, they require unique styles of parenting and education.Ignoring the science that challenges these claims, those who promote such theories make millions while frightening parents and educators into enforcing old stereotypes and reviving unhealthy attitudes in the classroom. Rivers and Barnett unmake the pseudoscientific rationale for this argument, stressing the individuality of each child and the specialness of his or her talents and desires. They recognize that in our culture, girls and boys encounter different stimuli and experiences, yet encouraging children to venture outside their comfort zones helps them realize a multifaceted character. Educating parents, teachers, and general readers in the true nature of the gender game, Rivers and Barnett enable future generations to transform if not transcend the parameters of sexual difference.

    While not sure initially if she wanted to be the Star's "woman columnist," Michele tried to use her column as a voice for those who had none. The hundreds of letters that poured in - both those in support of what she was writing and those outraged by it - let her know that what she was doing not only mattered, it was badly needed. For twenty-five years, Michele Landsberg chronicled the lives of women, their struggles and their achievements. She became an activist in support of women's rights, childcare programs, education reform, rape crisis centres, women's work and health, and many more hotly debated issues. Her columns were a force for social and legal change - women turned to her because they knew that they could count on her to tell the real story. In Writing the Revolution, Michele takes the best of those 3000 columns and uses them to reflect on the past, present, and future of women's lives in Canada. While recognizing the success of the women's movement, she knows the fight is not over. A feminist hero and an unflinching activist, Michele is an inspiration to the women who read her column, and to a passionate new generation of women who are fighting to see that the revolution continues.

    George Tiller at point blank range. Tiller, who was the most public practitioner of late-term abortions in America, had been a lightning rod for controversy, regularly referred to in the conservative media as “Tiller, the Baby Killer.” Tiller’s death was a pivotal, public murder in a war that has been raging for decades. It’s a war of violently opposing ideologies, encompassing abortion, but also questions of privacy, sexuality, and religion. It’s being fought in our nation’s courtrooms, school and churches, on television sets, at our dinner tables, and in our bedrooms. And more and more, the key battlegrounds are in Kansas, once home to Brown vs. Board of Education and some of the bloodiest conflicts of the Civil War. This is a gripping look at a cold-blooded terrorist action, two men representing opposite ideological extremes, and the region where those violent forces clash.

    Where, in such times, can poetry emerge, the book asks—and answers—again and again. Largely set in rural places and small towns, these poems are politically committed but deeply sensuous, emotionally complex and compassionate. They take up the everyday in meaningful ways, and deliver it with blunt force, yet not without hope or bright humor.

    Feminist Studies. Poetics. A MEGAPHONE collects a number of enactments that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young did between the years of 2005-2007. In these enactments, they attempted to think with the playful dogmatism of a feminist tradition that they call "crotchless pants and a machine gun" (obviously referencing Valie Export) in order to locate what might still be useful today about the somewhat beleaguered "second wave" feminist traditions. To that end, Spahr and Young lectured in Oulipian slenderized baby talk about figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic; they counted the numbers of women and men and tansgendered people in various poetry anthologies; and they invited writers from outside the US to talk about being a writer where they live (over seventy-five writers from Puerto Rico to Morocco to Croatia to South Africa to Syria to Micronesia to Korea responded). Also included in A MEGAPHONE are discussions of that always contested relationship between feminism and "experimental" poetry by Julian T. Brolaski, E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson, Christian Peet, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dale Smith, and A. E. Stallings. The book ends with a (soma)tic writing exercise from CAConrad, one designed to encourage readers and writers to create open, yet still meaningful, feminist alliances.

    The first happens near the age of 29, and second, near the age of 59. This book is both fiction and non-fiction: the first section is a novel about a woman astrologer in her second Saturn Return and the reader "learns" astrology through Isabelle's journey through sacred sites in England and the United States. The second section is where the reader can look up how Saturn is influencing them, and read about their unique Saturn placement in their life and astrology chart.

    Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book contains chapters focused on Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea novels, and Ekumen novels.

    Women make up the fastest-growing group of the U.S. prison population, yet prison scholarship largely overlooks the struggles of incarcerated women, and their voices are often silenced both in and out of the prison infrastructure. From the vantage points of those both inside and outside of prisons, this collection of essays and art illuminates many of the distinct experiences and concerns of incarcerated women, including those of girls in prison, abuse and rape, the policing of women, incarcerated motherhood, mental health issues in prisons, incarcerated women's artistic and cultural production, and prisons' impact on families, health, and sexuality. Combining the transcendence, hope and clarity of art with powerful analytical and conceptual tools, Razor Wire Women reveals the gendered dimensions of the incarceration now experienced by a growing number of women in the U.S.

    She decided instead to acquire an education and to participate in the liberation of Egypt from the British occupation. Huda became famous overnight when she led a peaceful walk of veiled women across Cairo in 1919 to free the leaders of the Egyptian resistance who were detained by the British forces. She was then invited by the members of the Bureau of the IAWS (International Alliance for Women's Suffrage) to participate in the international conference in Rome in 1923. Huda became the lifelong friend of Western and other feminist leaders at that conference. It was after this conference in Cairo when she and her two traveling companions removed their face veil upon leaving the train at the railway station and were spontaneously imitated by all the other women in what became a landmark gesture in Egyptian history. In 1923, Huda founded the Egyptian Feminist Union affiliated to the IAWS, and began publishing a French magazine, L'Egyptienne, to circulate information about Egypt's plight and achievements under the occupation, and to promote peace between Eastern and Western countries. She soon became - and remained for many years - one of the Vice-Presidents of the International Organization of Women. Huda Shaarawi alternated political advocacy with social and cultural projects. She spoke on behalf of the Arab and African peoples in International Fora, founding two magazines in Arabic to circulate information in her area of the world. Huda founded schools, supported artists, medical dispensaries, and cottage industries, and participated in funding the establishment of the first entirely Egyptian Bank and its many affiliated projects. A promoter of progress, Huda stubbornly and tirelessly advocated peace, justice, and equality in an increasingly violent world.

    Nussbaum, an acclaimed philosopher who is also a professor of law and a public intellectual. Her academic work focuses on questions of moral and political philosophy and on the nature of the emotions. But over the past 25years she has also written many book reviews for a general public, in periodicals such as The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Dating from 1986 to the present, these essays engage, constructively and also critically, with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, JudithButler, Richard Posner, Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Moller Okin, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding valuable work from little-known sources, deftly criticizing where criticism is due, and generally providing a compellingpicture of how philosophy in the Socratic tradition can engage with broad social concerns. For this volume, Nussbaum provides an intriguing introduction that explains her selection and provides her view of the role of the public philosopher.

    Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. Kelly E. Hayes provides an intimate and engaging account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gira and one of her devotees, Nazaré da Silva. Combining Nazaré’s spiritual biography with analysis of the gender politics and violence that shapes life on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Hayes highlights Pomba Gira’s role in the rivalries, relationships, and struggles of everyday life in urban Brazil.A DVD of the film Slaves of the Saints is included.

    Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

    Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."---Gay Community NewsObie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/PerformanceCover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

    What she learned instead were brutal truths about women’s rights, the politics of corruption, the failures of democracy, the mechanism of globalization, and a profound emotional connection that can only be called love. Moore’s fascinating story from the cusp of the global economic meltdown is a look at her time with the first all-women’s dormitory in the history of the country, just kilometers away from the notorious Killing Fields. Her tale is a noble one, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious; staunchly ethical yet conflicted and human.Moore’s in-depth examination of her stint among the first large group of social-justice-minded young women from the impoverished provinces is told in intimate, mood-evocative, beautifully-written first-person prose. Cambodian Grrrl is the first in a series of short essay collections on contemporary media, art, and educational work by, for, and with young women in Southeast Asia. Part memoir and part investigative report, Moore’s story could only be told by her. The result is illuminating, vital reading.

    

    In this travel diary, Mari illustrates the highs and lows of life on the road with a group of strangers.

    French writer and feminist, and Existentialist. She is known primarily for her treatise The Second Sex (1949), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the "eternal feminine." It became a classic of feminist literature during the 1960s. Her novels expounded the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer's commitment to the times. She Came To Stay (1943) treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to "the other". Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is The Mandarins (1954), a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their "mandarin" (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography which constitute a telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s. In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in A Very Easy Death (1964), on her mother's death in a hospital. In 1981 she wrote A Farewell to Sartre, a painful account of Sartre's last years. Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality. Table of Contents: The Second Sex, On the publication of The Second Sex, interview The Ethics of Ambiguity, Biography

    Another saw this as a nightmare that served only the interest of wealthy whites. Both were sons of Baptist ministers. Both grew up to be icons of the civil rights movement.Integration versus separatism. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have come to symbolize the two primary strands of black political thought during the civil rights movement, much as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois had more than a half-century earlier. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his foreword, the parallels and divergences between the two men remain striking.Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson compares and contrasts these two giants in her fascinating dual biography. She offers a concise account of their lives, accomplishments, and challenges. In a crisp, fascinating narrative, she reveals the interconnectedness of their goals, their visions, and their legacies. Most provocative, she suggests what might have been, as their philosophies began to converge, were it not for a pair of assassins’ bullets.

    While American women excel in education at every level, they likewise obsessively focus on celebrity media. While women outperform their male counterparts in employment in urban areas for the first time in history, they simultaneously spend countless hours staring in the mirror contemplating plastic surgery. Lisa Bloom fears that women are in danger of spiraling into a nation of dumbed down, tabloid media obsessed, reality TV addicts. Too often, they outsource matters to "experts" and in doing so neglect to truly think for themselves.The solution:Lisa Bloom has the solution and it involves one simple word: Think.In this provocative, entertaining, educational, and thoroughly researched book, Lisa outlines the ways that we as a society, and particularly women, have fallen off the intellectual path, and, very specifically, points to how damaging this has been to us on many levels. Lisa shows us the fallout--but she also provides the solutions for "Reclaiming the Brain God Gave You" and seizing back control of your mind and your life. Think is delivered in a no-nonsense manner that will make you laugh, make you question yourself, make you squirm, but, most important, make you start thinking again.

    Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition. Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist’s intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López’s I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

    The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. In this book, Chikako Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies.Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD, she argues, became a "politically versatile technology," adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers' attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists' concerns--from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion--and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, Takeshita finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device.

    Some of Rosalia's most famous poems are also presented in their original Castilian so that interested readers can compare de Castro's highly charged thoughts and phrases with Reid's interpretations. It is hoped that Rosalia's unique vision, her firmly feminist outlook and her startling modernity have been well served. Most of the poems in this anthology have been selected from her best and most famous collection, "On the Banks of the River Sar" (1884), published shortly before her death. A few poems have been taken from "La Flor" (1857) and "A mi madre" (1863).

    Women greatly outnumber men as activists, yet surprisingly, little has been written about the importance and impact of gender on the movement. Women and the Animal Rights Movement combats stereotypes of women activists as mere sentimentalists by exploring the political and moral character of their advocacy on behalf of animals.Emily Gaarder analyzes the politics of gender in the movement, incorporating in-depth interviews with women and participant observation of animal rights organizations, conferences, and protests to describe struggles over divisions of labor and leadership. Controversies over PETA advertising campaigns that rely on women's sexuality to "sell" animal rights illustrate how female crusaders are asked to prioritize the cause of animals above all else. Gaarder underscores the importance of a paradigm shift in the animal liberation movement, one that seeks a more integrated vision of animal rights that connects universally to other issues--gender, race, economics, and the environment--highlighting that many women activists recognize and are motivated by the connection between the oppression of animals and other social injustices.

    The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies.

    This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.

    Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

    Ten science fiction stories by acclaimed author Linda Nagata, including the Nebula Award winning novella “Goddesses.” This collection brings together for the first time Nagata’s short fiction, originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, More Amazing Stories, and SciFi.com.Story list:Spectral Expectations (Analog 1987)Career Decision (Analog 1988)In the Tide (Analog 1989)Small Victories (Analog 1993)Liberator (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1993)Old Mother (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1995)The Bird Catcher's Children (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1997)Hooks, Nets, and Time (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1997)The Flood (More Amazing Stories 1998)Goddesses (Sci-Fi.com 2000)

    Women are the unsung heroes of their communities, often using minimal resources to challenge oppressive structures and create powerful alternatives in the arts, education, and workplace.Here are candid, first-person stories of fifteen Aboriginal women who embody the spirit of Âhkamêyimowak; whose strength and vision has made a difference - for their communities, and for us all.

    Violence, in other words, is often hidden in plain sight. Space, Place, and Violence seeks to uncover that which is too apparent: to critically question both violent geographies and the geographies of violence. With a focus on direct violence, this book situates violent acts within the context of broader political and structural conditions. Violence, it is argued, is both a social and spatial practice. Adopting a geographic perspective, Space, Place, and Violence provides a critical reading of how violence takes place and also produces place. Specifically, four spatial vignettes - home, school, streets, and community - are introduced, designed so that students may think critically how 'race', sex, gender, and class inform violent geographies and geographies of violence.

    Sax offers the tools we need to help them become independent and confident women, and provides parents with practical tips on everything from helping their daughter limit her time on social media, to choosing a sport, to nurturing her spirit through female-centered activities. Compelling and inspiring, Girls on the Edge points the way to a new future for today's girls and young women.

    Few have taken her seriously as a political thinker, even though in her lifetime she was a vigorous public intellectual within a global network of progressive politics. Engaging Goldman as a political thinker allows us to rethink the common dualism between theory and practice, scrutinize stereotypes of anarchism by placing Goldman within a fuller historical context, recognize the remarkable contributions of anarchism in creating public life, and open up contemporary politics to the possibilities of transformative feminism.

    Women's acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulations, their acquiescence to violence atthe hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of adaptive preferences, wherein women participate in their own deprivation.Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. Khader defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related todeprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. She insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but she explains how this fact does not undermine those people'sclaim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. Khader claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions ofthe good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice.Khader's deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

    Travis, MD, lauded as one of the founding fathers of the wellness movement, became a parent, he was shocked to discover how unprepared he was for coping with the emotional challenges of parenthood. Here his wife and colleague, Meryn Callander, shares the story of their confident plunge into parenthood and the subsequent unraveling of that confidence, as they discovered themselves floundering, exhausted and struggling to deal with the challenges confronting them. Why Dads Leave reveals the cultural and generational forces that are colluding to create an unac- knowledged epidemic of disappearing dads--fathers leaving their families, physically or emotionally, soon after the birth of a child. Nearly twenty years in the making, this book provides insights and practical ways of preventing and healing the insidious and devastating impact of this dynamic. Beautifully written, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest, Why Dads Leave offers understanding and hope for men and the women who love them.

    Flippin.” Dr. Charles Flippin’s reputation came under siege throughout the state as another newspaper editor alleged that the African American physician had committed “that most despicable of all crimes”—illegal abortion.For thirty years rural Kansans and Nebraskans had hailed Flippin as a godsend because of his skill as a physician and his willingness to help anyone regardless of race or social class. Despite performing abortions even for young white women, Flippin managed to avoid conviction in several trials until finally pleading guilty in 1924. Tallman details the doctor’s extraordinary life and analyzes the forces behind the prosecution of the aging physician. The first book to focus exclusively on attitudes towards abortion in early twentieth-century rural communities, The Notorious Dr. Flippin supplies long overlooked context for current debate and enriches studies of African American, western, women’s, and medical history.

    She is also among the most wide ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children’s fiction, and psychoanalysis. During the past decade, through talks and pieces that Rose has contributed to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and other publications, she has played a vital role in public debate about the policies and human-rights record of Israel in its relation to the Palestinians. Representing the entire spectrum of her writing, The Jacqueline Rose Reader brings together essays, reviews, and book excerpts, as well as an extract from her novel. In the introduction, the editors provide a profound overview of her intellectual trajectory, highlighting themes that unify her diverse work, particularly her commitment to psychoanalytic theory as a uniquely productive way of analyzing literature, culture, politics, and society. Including extensive critical commentary, and a candid interview with Rose, this anthology is an indispensable introduction for those unfamiliar with Jacqueline Rose’s remarkably original work, and an invaluable resource for those well acquainted with her critical acumen.

    Goddess on Earth features a wide array of women—ages 8-99—photographed embodying the Divine Feminine. Among those featured in the book are Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis, Tony Award Winner Shirley Knight, actresses LisaGay Hamilton and Karen Allen; spiritual and political activists Tashi Dolma and Nomfundo Walaza; best-selling authors Isabel Allende and Madhur Jaffrey; and many others. The women portrayed in Goddess on Earth share their own personal insights, describing their connection to the goddess they chose to portray. There is also an introduction by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., and an afterword by noted activist and author Starhawk. Goddess on Earth is a celebration of female diversity and empowerment.

    Early in the world you travel into them. One day you rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away. Having slept under stars and still breathing the greyed fire, who would take time to suppose this the middle of a lifetime?" -Emma Lou Warner Thayne "In view of the terrifying event with which it begins, it is a wonderful surprise to find the tremendous joy behind this book. It is everywhere suffused with Emma Lou Thayne's astonishing energy and capacity for love. She has found many lives inside herself, and teaches us to rejoice in that." -Henry Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winner "I think this book is Emma Lou's tour de force ... I couldn't put it down. Her 'voice' and spirit and visual poetic nature reached my heart and spirit, as if apart from my mind. The depth of her spirituality and belief in the goodness of people inspire me." -Stephen R. Covey, author, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" "In her poetry or prose, Emma Lou has the ability to make us laugh and likewise to cry-but always the unique ability to make us understand life a little better." -Olene S. Walker, first woman governor of UtahKnowing is a process, not an arrival. The Place of Knowing: A Spiritual Autobiography celebrates the spiritual-both seen and unseen-through the life of acclaimed writer and devout Mormon Emma Lou Warner Thayne. In this insightful, eloquently written memoir, Emma Lou--author of thirteen books of poetry, essays, and fiction--shares poignant personal anecdotes that begin with a terrifying near-death experience when, without warning, a six-pound iron rod smashed through a car windshield into her face. As she narrates her journey through her recovery process, she reflects on previous life experiences--from the daily to the sublime. Through both example and insight, she shares adventures while offering a calming presence for those who may fear death, yearn to know how to celebrate life, and crave direction on how to access the wonders of the divine. For anyone who has wondered about life after death or who desires a better understanding of his or her divine self, The Place of Knowing will inspire spiritual seekers everywhere to reach out in friendship to others and to embrace new experiences--ultimately discovering themselves in the process.

    Perhaps this gap is due to the severe repression that radicals of any color in America faced as early as the 1930s, and into the Red Scare of the 1950s. To be radical, "and" black "and" a woman was to be forced to the margins and consequently, these women's stories have been deeply buried and all but forgotten by the general public and historians alike.In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended community of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser-known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. Radicalism at the Crossroads offers a sustained and in-depth analysis of the political thought and activism of black women radicals during the Cold War period and adds a new dimension to our understanding of this tumultuous and violent time in United States history.

    

    Yet, challenges to the industry continue to be dismissed as uncool, antisex, and moral panic. Unmasking the lies behind the selling of porn as entertainment, this book reveals the shocking truths of an industry that trades in violence, crime, and degradation while discussing topics such as racism in gay male porn, the use of animals in porn, child pornography, and BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism). Fearless and controversial, this examination will challenge the current view of pornography.

    The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional "right" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries.Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.