Best of
Feminist-Theory

2009

The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 2009
    As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children’s books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work. While the reader contains much of Anzaldúa’s published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published. This newly available work offers fresh insights into crucial aspects of Anzaldúa’s life and career, including her upbringing, education, teaching experiences, writing practice and aesthetics, lifelong health struggles, and interest in visual art, as well as her theories of disability, multiculturalism, pedagogy, and spiritual activism. The pieces are arranged chronologically; each one is preceded by a brief introduction. The collection includes a glossary of Anzaldúa’s key terms and concepts, a timeline of her life, primary and secondary bibliographies, and a detailed index.

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching


Crystal N. Feimster - 2009
    Many more were tarred and feathered, burned, whipped, or raped. In this brutal world of white supremacist politics and patriarchy, a world violently divided by race, gender, and class, black and white women defended themselves and challenged the male power brokers. Crystal Feimster breaks new ground in her story of the racial politics of the postbellum South by focusing on the volatile issue of sexual violence.Pairing the lives of two Southern women--Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded lynching a white tool of political terror against southern blacks, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching black men accused of raping white women--Feimster makes visible the ways in which black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South. While Wells was black and Felton was white, both were journalists, temperance women, suffragists, and anti-rape activists. By placing their concerns at the center of southern politics, Feimster illuminates a critical and novel aspect of southern racial and sexual dynamics. Despite being on opposite sides of the lynching question, both Wells and Felton sought protection from sexual violence and political empowerment for women."Southern Horrors" provides a startling view into the Jim Crow South where the precarious and subordinate position of women linked black and white anti-rape activists together in fragile political alliances. It is a story that reveals how the complex drama of political power, race, and sex played out in the lives of Southern women.

The Judy Grahn Reader


Judy Grahn - 2009
    When I was nineteen I discovered the poetry of Judy Grahn, and I was so moved by A Woman Is Talking to Death, it's still one of my favorite poems ever, in the world."--Ani DiFranco"Judy Grahn has done more to create a women's literature than any other writer in the past half century." --Ron Silliman

String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art


Elissa Auther - 2009
    In this full-color illustrated volume, Elissa Auther discusses the work of American artists using fiber, considering provocative questions of material, process, and intention that bridge the art-craft divide.Drawn to the aesthetic possibilities and symbolic power of fiber, the artists whose work is explored here-Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Claire Zeisler, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, and others-experimented with materials that previously had been dismissed for their associations with the merely decorative, with "arts and crafts," and with "women's work." In analyzing this shift and these exceptional artists' works, Auther engages far-reaching debates in the art world: What accounts for the distinction between art and craft? Who assigns value to these categories, and who polices the boundaries distinguishing them?String, Felt, Thread not only illuminates the centrality of fiber to contemporary artistic practice but also uncovers the social dynamics-including the roles of race and gender-that determine how art has historically been defined and valued.

Sex Slavery


Voltairine de Cleyre - 2009
    A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected. Table of Contents - About This Book - Sex Slavery

First Voices: An Aboriginal Women's Reader


Patricia Monture-Angus - 2009
    Who are you and where do you fit into an Indigenous world? In many Indigenous traditions, governance starts with the self. We then fit into clans, families, communities and nations. Understanding yourself is always balanced by understanding your relationships. Primary among Indigenous relationships is our relations to the natural world. Territory is equally an important concept. This Aboriginal women's studies reader is organized under the above themes. It is intended to assist readers in learning about the great diversity across Aboriginal nations in Canada, but also the diversity of women within those nations. The articles chosen represent many of the struggles that Aboriginal women have faced in Canada. These include struggles with the Canadian criminal justice system, with inclusion in self-government and constitutional reform, issues of membership in bands and matrimonial real property. Many of the articles are framed around the quest for equality.

Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future


Heide Göttner-Abendroth - 2009
    Gender Studies. Political Science. SOCIETIES OF PEACE: MATRIARCHIES PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE, edited by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, celebrates women's largely ignored and/or invisible contribution to culture by exploring matriarchal societies that have existed in the past and that continue to exist today in certain parts of the world. Matriarchal societies, primarily shaped by women, have a non violent social order in which all living creatures are respected without the exploitation of humans, animals or nature. They are well-balanced and peaceful societies in which domination is unknown and all beings are treated equally. This book presents these largely misunderstood societies, both past and present, to the wider public, as alternative social and cultural models that promote trust, mutuality, and abundance for all.

Men Who Buy Sex: Who They Buy and What They Know


Melissa Farley - 2009
    A research study of 103 men who describe their use of trafficked and non-trafficked women in prostitution, and their awareness of coercion and violence.

Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy


Catherine Malabou - 2009
    Violence alone confers her being—whether it is domestic and social violence or theoretical violence. The critique of ‘essentialism’ (i.e. there is no specifically feminine essence) proposed by both gender theory and deconstruction is just one more twist in the ontological negation of the feminine.Contrary to all expectations, however, this ever more radical hollowing out of woman within intellectual movements supposed to protect her, this assimilation of woman to a ‘being nothing’, clears the way for a new beginning. Let us now assume the thought of ‘woman’ as an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it is empty, a resistance that strikes down the impossibility of its own disappearance once and for all. To ask what remains of woman after the sacrifice of her being is to signal a new era in the feminist struggle, changing the terms of the battle to go beyond both essentialism and anti-essentialism.In this groundbreaking work Catherine Malabou begins with philosophy, asking: what is the life of a woman philosopher?

Identity/Difference Politics: How Difference Is Produced, and Why It Matters


Rita Dhamoon - 2009
    Identity/Difference Politics offers a nuanced critique of these debates by switching the focus from culture to power. Issues of power are examined through accounts of meaning-making - those processes through which meanings of difference are produced, organized, and regulated. Other forms of identity/difference such as whiteness, ableism, gender, and heteronormativity establish the analytic and normative value of Dhamoon's alternative theoretical framework, and reveal that an exclusive preoccupation with culture can dissolve into essentialism - which too often provides a rationale for state regulation of groups deemed to be too different.

On the Road to Healing: An Anthology for Men Ending Sexism


Basil ShadidSam Pullen - 2009
    Originally published as a series of zines between 1995 and 2004, the works inside have served as a resource and as a challenge to all men who want a world that is free from oppression and war. Contributors include Sam Pullen, Donald Cavanaugh, Jeff Ott, Tony Switzer, Loolwa Khazzoom, Chris Dixon, Qwo-Li Driskill, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran, Cameron Bustamante, Todd Denny, Basil Shadid, billie rain, Chris Crass and Michael Flood.

Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films


Heather Addison - 2009
    media and popular culture. Like lightning rods, these high-profile mothers attract accolades and judgments associated with ideals of female sexuality, gender roles, and constructions of contemporary families. Motherhood Misconceived explores this widespread cultural fascination with motherhood through analyses of mothers in contemporary U.S. film, including both mainstream and independent cinematic representations. The contributors draw on a variety of critical approaches to consider the spectacle of pregnancy; mother-daughter relationships; mothers as predators, narcissists, and absent victims; and the ways in which cultural anxieties are displaced and projected onto marginalized mothers in films such as Fargo; Transamerica; Gas, Food, Lodging; Ordinary People; and Scream. Ideal for women's studies or film studies classes, Motherhood Misconceived will help students contextualize current debates about motherhood as they play out in popular and independent film.

Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation


Sorcha GunneTessa Roynon - 2009
    In developing these new feminist readings of rape narratives, the contributors aim to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new dimensions of healing. This book makes a vital contribution to the fields of literary studies and feminism, since while other volumes have focused on retroactive portrayals of rape in literature, to date none has focused entirely on the subversive work that is being done to retheorize sexual violence.Split into four sections, the volume considers sexual violence from a number of different angles. 'Subverting the Story' considers how the characters of the victim and rapist might be subverted in narratives of sexual violence. In 'Metaphors for Resistance, ' the essays explore how writers approach the subject of rape obliquely using metaphors to represent their suffering and pain. The controversy of not speaking about sexual violence is the focus of 'The Protest of Silence, ' while 'The Question of the Visual' considers the problems of making sexual violence visible in the poetic image, in film and on stage. These four sections cover an impressive range of world writing which includes curriculum staples like Toni Morrison, Sarah Kane, Sandra Cisneros, Yvonne Vera, and Sharon Olds.