In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

    New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha."At one level or another, all the work in the collection seeks to find ways to understand and articulate our multiple identities and senses of place….Making Face/Making Soul is an exciting collection of dynamic, important writings that all women of color and white feminists will learn from, enjoy, and return to again and again and again."—Sojourner"...the pieces are stunning in what they risk and reveal..."—The San Francisco Chronicle

    Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as creatures which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, and brilliant, by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

    She values postmodernism's insights while warning that the fashionable infatuation with "discourse" about "difference" is dangerously detachable from the struggle we must all wage against racism, sexism, and cultural imperialism.

    Cynthia Enloe pulls back the curtain on the familiar scenes—governments promoting tourism, companies moving their factories overseas, soldiers serving on foreign soil—and shows that the real landscape is not exclusively male. She describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. In exposing policymakers' reliance on false notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," Enloe dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, revealing it to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

    What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.

    It is also a study of gender, that is, a study of how sex roles and possibilities are conceptualized by both men and women, even though asymmetric power relationships and men's greater access to knowledge have informed the cultural construction of categories such as "male" and "female," "heretic" and "saint." Finally, these essays are about the creativity of women's voices and women's bodies.Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male / female and powerful / weak to facilitate their own imitatio Christi, yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into humanitas. Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and "study women."

    Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women.The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing.While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.

    This book ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture, from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies, Freud to Fatal Attraction, are all included in his study.

    She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

    Born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, she was a public school teacher until 1956, when she was dismissed for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the advancement of Colored People. Subsequently, she worked for the Highlander Folk School, helping to set up Citizenship Schools throughout the South where Black adults could learn to read and prepare to vote. During the 1960s she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From 1978 to 1983 she served as the first Black woman on the Charleston School Board. This is a first-person narrative of her life in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Her story constitutes a major thread in the tapestry of that movement.

    Here are first-class stories with the energy and freshness we expect from a beginning." --Doris Lessing, The Independent"This collection of stories, speeches, essays, poems and memoirs bears fierce testimony to a tradition of brave Arab feminist writing in the face of subjugation by a Muslim patriarchy."--Publishers Weekly"This impressive collection of writings by Arab women... represent[s] a powerful series of vignettes by women who were both insightful and gifted, into the lives of women who have lived 'behind the veil' over the last 100 years."--Arab Book World"An expression of indigenous, intrepid feminism in the Arab world."--Ms."Opening the Gates succeeds not because of its methodology, but because of the stories the women tell."--Voice Literary Supplement

    A leaflet distributed at pride march in NYPublished anonymously by QueersJune, 1990

    It is an invaluable resource which helps set history straight." --Julian Bond..". remains one of the best single sources currently available on the unique contributions of Black women in the desegregation movement." --Manning MarableRewrites the history of the civil rights movement, recognizing the contributions of Black women.

    It serves both as a guide to the current debates and directions and as a digest of the history of twentieth-century feminist ideas about language.This edition includes extracts from Felly Nkweto Simmonds, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Luce Irigaray, Sara Mills, Margaret Doyle, Debbie Cameron, Susan Ehrlich, Ruth King, Kate Clark, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Deborah Tannen, Aki Uchida, Jennifer Coates and Kira Hall.

    She was the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, the first correspondent personally expelled from Nazi Germany by Hitler, a powerful voice in the anti-Fascist movement and adviser to Roosevelt and Churchill.

    It engages fundamental issues raised by attempts to define such concepts as mainstream, minority, and other, and opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation. All of the texts deal with questions of representation in the broadest sense, encompassing not just the visual but also the social and psychological aspects of cultural identity. Included are important theoretical writings by Homi Bhabha, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Monique Wittig. Their work is juxtaposed with essays on more overtly personal themes, often autobiographical, by Gloria Anzaldua, Bell Hooks, and Richard Rodriguez, among others. This rich anthology brings together voices from many different marginalized groups - groups that are often isolated from each other as well as from the dominant culture. It joins issues of gender, race, sexual preference, and class in one forum but without imposing a false unity on the diverse cultures represented. Each piece in the book subtly changes the way every other piece is read. While several essays focus on specific issues in art, such as John Yau's piece on Wilfredo Lam in the Museum of Modern Art, or James Clifford's on collecting art, others draw from debates in literature, film, and critical theory to provide a much broader context than is usually found in work aimed at an art audience. Topics range from the functions of language to the role of public art in the city, from gay pornography to the meanings of black hair styles. Out There also includes essays by Rosalyn Deutsche, Richard Dyer, Kobena Mercer, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gerald Vizenor and Simon Watney, as well as by the editors.Copublished with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Distributed by The MIT Press.

    Becoming part of a strange family, the courageous Maggie faces difficult choices of life on the frontier. Vividly portrays the danger and excitement of early America.--Los Angeles Times Book Review.

    In this new book, Michele Wallace poses the historical and conceptual questions which an emergent black feminist theory address.The author begins with a consideration of the work of her mother, the artist Faith Ringgold, and moves on to recollections of her own early life in Harlem, and an account of her development as a writer in the 1970s. She examines the collective legacy with which black artists—from Zora Neale Hurston and Ntozake Shange, to Spike Lee and Michael Jackson—must contend in carving out a distinctive cultural practice.Wallace’s book marks a new departure in contemporary criticism, as she combines the flair of a popular journalist with the rigor of a committed scholar. Invisibility Blues is certain to become a landmark in cultural studies and a fundamental document in the history of black feminism.

    Addressing issues of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, it provides a more accurate and inclusive history of US women.

    In this book Suleiman shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists in the 20th century and in the process offers interpretations of major French avant-garde writers.

    Partial Justice, the only full-scale study of the origins and development of women's prisons in the United States, traces their evolution from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It shows that the character of penal treatment was involved in the very definition of womanhood for incarcerated women, a definition that varied by race and social class.Rafter traces the evolution of women's prisons, showing that it followed two markedly different models. Custodial institutions for women literally grew out of men's penitentiaries, starting from a separate room for women. Eventually women were housed in their own separate facilities-a development that ironically inaugurated a continuing history of inmate neglect. Then, later in the nineteenth century, women convicted of milder offenses, such as morals charges, were placed into a new kind of institution. The reformatory was a result of middle-class reform movements, and it attempted to rehabilitate to a degree unknown in men's prisons. Tracing regional and racial variations in these two branches of institutions over time, Rafter finds that the criminal justice system has historically meted out partial justice to female inmates. Women have benefited in neither case.Partial Justice draws in first-hand accounts, legislative documents, reports by investigatory commissions, and most importantly, the records of over 4,600 female prisoners taken from the original registers of five institutions. This second edition includes two new chapters that bring the story into the present day and discusses measures now being used to challenge the partial justice women have historically experienced.

    In "Men's Dreams, Men's Healing", Robert Hopcke has framed masculine psychology within the dreams of two men, one homosexual one hetrosexual. In sharing his encounters with these men over years of dreamwork and therapy, Hopcke spotlights several recurrent themes in the suffering and redemption of modern man's inner masculinity which includes the lack of even minimal feeling awareness and the fear of intimacy among modern men, issues of authority, the heterosexual male's "inner feminine" and the homosexual male's "inner masculine" as well as the experience of fatherhood. Drawing on the work of Jung, Greek myths and Christian symbolism Hopcke uses the inner journeys of these two men to move the reader toward a new understanding of what it means to be a man in contemporary society.

    In the bestselling tradition of The Dance of Anger, a compassionate and insightful guide that shows women how they can learn to feel good about who they are and what they do.

    The image of the colonial goodwife, valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a dependent and a non-producer. This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the real economy. Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.

    From Anzia Yezierska and Edna Ferber to Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, these writers reveal a rich, vital, and innovative tradition.

    Sophisticated in its analysis, yet not at all technical in its exposition, this book will find a wide readership among feminists, the general public, and the scientific community.

    it is a remarkable study, raising many controversial issues and promising ther reader a compelling engagement with the subject. (From the book jacket)

    Yet today those questions are harder and harder to answer. Traditions about the "real man" and the "woman's place" have been challenged. Scientists debate what nature actually dictates for male and female. And theologians engage in heated controversy over what the Bible really says about female submission and male headship.

    Armed with the names of women who teach these sacred texts, she set out on a journey of discovery, eventually reconciling her feminist views with the sexist views of traditional Judaism. A National Jewish Book Award nominee.

    "A delightful book of life-affirming legends, rituals and images that helps us envision a more balanced and creative world"--Riane Eisler, author, The Chalice and the Blade. "A beautiful book....An excellent source for information and inspiration from many cultures."