Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways.

    How many times a week do we hear or say these words? If we all took the time to care for ourselves, how much stronger will we be? More importantly how much stronger will our communities be? In Take Care of Your Self, Iraqi artist and curator Sundus Abdul Hadi turns a critical and inventive eye on the notion of self-care, rejecting the idea that self-care means buying stuff and recasting it as a collective practice rooted in the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Throughout, Abdul Hadi explores the role of art in fostering healing for those affected by racism, war, and displacement, weaving in the artwork of twenty-seven artists of color from diverse backgrounds to identify the points where these struggles intersect. In centering the voices of those often relegated to the margins of the art world and emphasizing the imperative to create safe spaces for artists of color to explore their complicated reactions to oppression, Abdul Hadi casts self-care as a political act rooted in the impulse toward self-determination, empowerment, and healing that animates the work of artists of color across the world.

    Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness.In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships.Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”

    Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the health of their pregnancies. The horrific results include women giving birth while shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, and even delivering in prison toilets. In some states, pregnancy has become a bargaining chip with prosecutors offering reduced sentences in exchange for women agreeing to be sterilized. The author shows how prosecutors may abuse laws and infringe women's rights in the process, sometimes with the complicity of medical providers who disclose private patient information to law enforcement. Often the women most affected are poor and of color. This timely book brings to light how the unrestrained efforts to punish and police women's bodies have led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world to be pregnant.

    Organized thematically and with substantial introductions, this is a book for the activist, the student, the too-angry and the not-angry-enough.You'll find:"Dyke Manifesto" by the Lesbian Avengers"Mini-Manual of Individualist Anarchism" by Emile Armand"Intercourse" by Andrea Dworkin"Manifesto of the Erased" by Crystal ZaragozaThe "Ax Tampax Poem Feministo" from the Bloodsisters Project"Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway"TRASHGiRRRRLLLZZZ" by Elizabeth Broeder"The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft" by Peter GreyThe manifesto, feminist scholar Breanne Fahs notes, is always "on unsteady ground," raging and wanting, desiring and disdaining, promoting solidarity or individual pain, all at once. As she notes, we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness and their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance is where new ideas are born.

    The facts surrounding how male-centric medicine impacts women's health every day are chilling: in the ER, women are more likely to receive a psychiatric diagnosis with regard to opioid use, while men are more likely to be referred for detoxification; the more vocal women become about their pain, the more likely their providers are to prescribe either inadequate or inappropriate pain relief medication; women often present with nontraditional symptoms of stroke, which causes delays in recognition by both them and their health professionals; and a government accountability study found that 80% of drugs that are withdrawn from the market are due to side effects that happen to women (a result of testing drugs mostly on men).Leading expert on sex and gender medicine Dr. Alyson McGregor focuses on the key areas where these differences are most potentially harmful, addressing:Cardiac and stroke diagnosis and treatment in women;Prescription and dosing of pharmaceuticals;Subjective evaluation of women's symptoms;Pain and pain management;Hormones and female biochemistry (including prescribed hormones);How economic status, race, and gender identity are additional critical factors.Not only does Dr. McGregor explore these disparities in depth, she shares clear, practical suggestions for what we can do. A work of riveting expose, revelatory insights into the medical establishment and actionable guidance for putting this information to use, Sex Matters is an empowering roadmap for reinventing modern medicine -- and for self-care.

    Fast forward to the current re-examination of feminism in light of the #MeToo movement and an emerging new wave of radical feminism—Sheila Jeffreys' bold account makes it clear that the feminism and lesbianism she has championed for decades is needed more than ever. With honesty and frankness, she tells of victories and setbacks in her unrelenting commitment to women’s freedom from men’s violence, especially the violence inherent in pornography and prostitution. We also learn what her steadfastness has cost her in terms of personal and professional rewards. Trigger Warning places radical feminism within a cultural, social, and intellectual context while also taking us on a personal journey. Sheila Jeffreys has tirelessly crossed the globe to advance radical feminist theory and practice and we are invited to share in the intellectual and political crossroads she has encountered during her life. Accessible yet detailed and rigorous, this landmark volume is essential reading for everyone who has ever wondered what radical feminism really is.

    This unique book sets the record straight.Through interviews with key scholars, including Angela Y. Davis and Silvia Federici, Bhandar and Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions.Collectively, these interviews trace the ways in which Black feminists, Third World and post-colonial feminists, and indigenous women have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another.

    This movement in transgender politics has turned coloniser, erasing the bodies, agency, and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men’s rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called ‘innate’ (a ‘feeling’ located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream. Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles. An eye-opening book.

    She was also the first poet in the Bangla language to present a retelling of the Ram story from the point of view of Sita. Idolised as a model of marital obedience and chastity in Valmiki’s Ramayan, Chandrabati’s lyrical retelling of Sita’s story offers us a fresh perspective. Written in order to be sung before a non-courtly audience, mainly of womenfolk of rural Bengal, Chandrabati’s Ramayan adds new characters and situations to the story to provide new interpretations of already known events drawing richly on elements of existing genres. Its location in the tales of everyday life has ensured that Chandrabati’s Ramayan lives on in the hearts of village women of modern-day India.NABANEETA DEV SEN was one of Bengal’s best-known writers. Equally adept at poetry (her most favoured genre) she also wrote novels, plays, travelogues, critical and academic pieces. She was for many years a teacher of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata and remained involved at the level of activism and support in women’s causes. Chandrabati’s Ramayan was a work that was very close to her heart and this manuscript was completed on her 80th birthday, just under a year before she passed away. Its publication is our tribute to her.

    As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carrière brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois women authors under the banner of metafeminism. Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carrière shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of colour, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carrière's tone is personal and accessible throughout - in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing. Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.