Best of
Gender

1991

Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 1991
    Highly recommended... " --Choice..". the book challenges assumptions and pushes historic and geographical boundaries that must be altered if women of all colors are to win the struggles thrust upon us by the 'new world order' of the 1990s." --New Directions for Women"This surely is a book for anyone trying to comprehend the ways sexism fuels racism in a post-colonial, post-Cold War world that remains dangerous for most women." --Cynthia H. Enloe..". provocative analyses of the simultaneous oppressions of race, class, gender and sexuality... a powerful collection." --Gloria Anzaldua..". propels third world feminist perspectives from the periphery to the cutting edge of feminist theory in the 1990s." --Aihwa Ong..". a carefully presented wealth of much-needed information." --Audre Lorde..". it is a significant book." --The Bloomsbury Review..". excellent... The nondoctrinaire approach to the Third World and to feminism in general is refreshing and compelling." --World Literature Today..". an excellent collection of essays examining 'Third World' feminism." --The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural TheoryThese essays document the debates, conflicts, and contradictions among those engaged in developing third world feminist theory and politics. Contributors: Evelyne Accad, M. Jacqui Alexander, Carmen Barroso, Cristina Bruschini, Rey Chow, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Angela Gilliam, Faye V. Harrison, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, Barbara Smith, Nayereh Tohidi, Lourdes Torres, Cheryl L. West, & Nellie Wong.

Angry Women


V. Vale - 1991
    Sixteen performance artists discuss human sexuality, racism, sexism, and the ways in which art can be used to break down taboos and dogma.

Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men


Essex HemphillCalvin Glenn - 1991
    African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award. BROTHER TO BROTHER, begun by Joseph Beam and completed by Essex Hemphill after Beam's death in 1988, is a collection of now-classic literary work by black gay male writers. Originally published in 1991 and out of print for several years, BROTHER TO BROTHER is a community of voices, Hemphill writes. [It] tells a story that laughs and cries and sings and celebrates...it's a conversation intimate friends share for hours. These are truly words mined syllable by syllable from the harts of black gay men. You're invited to listen in because you're family, and these aren't secrets-not to us, so why should they be secrets to you? Just listen. Your brother is speaking. This new edition includes an introduction by Jafari Allen.

Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women


Martha A. Ackelsberg - 1991
    Courageous enough to create revolutionary change in their daily lives, Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women into an organized network to strive for community, education, and equality for women -during the Spanish Revolution. Martha Ackelsberg writes a comprehensive study of Mujeres Libres, intertwining interviews with the women themselves and analysis connecting them with modern feminist movements.Martha Ackelsberg is a professor of government and a member of the Women’s Studies Program Committee at Smith College, where she teaches courses in political theory, urban politics, political activism and feminist theory. She has contributed to a variety of anthologies on women’s political activism in the United States.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women


Susan Faludi - 1991
    Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date. When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.With passion and precision, Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.

The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion


Angela Bonavoglia - 1991
    First published ten years ago, this collection of 25 powerful stories from contributors both famous and ordinary, privileged and poor, provides often harrowing insights into what happens when women are denied the right to choose. Testimonials from teenagers, college students, overloaded young mothers, and even a retired male Marine put a human face on one of this country’s most controversial issues and offer passionate arguments for access to legal and safe abortions.

Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, V: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century


Susie J. Tharu - 1991
    This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as “intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical,” place the writers and their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.Volume I: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.

Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War


Dudley Young - 1991
    Line drawings.

Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture


Chris Knight - 1991
    This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women.

La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth


Sandra Messinger Cypess - 1991
    This is the first serious study tracing La Malinche in texts from the conquest period to the present day.

Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing


Thomas R. Golden - 1991
    The book explains the uniqueness of the masculine side of healing and shows how this can manifests in men and also in women. Swallowed by a Snake is meant to be a map and a guide through the experience of loss. Helping you move through the pain of loss and into a place of healing and transformation. Discover new and powerful ways to heal. How the genders differ in thei healing. Greater understanding between partners. Examples of successful and uniqueness. New ways to understnad your grief. Ways the individual's loss can impact the entire family.

Women's Growth In Connection: Writings from the Stone Center


Judith V. Jordan - 1991
    It offers an alternative to traditional models of human development that define health and maturity in terms of separation and consistently define women as deficient. Written by leading clinicians and teachers from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, the book foregrounds women's meaning systems, values, and organization of experiences, which often revolve around relationships rather than the self. The authors set out basic relational principles and consider the implications for life challenges that many women face, as well as for psychotherapy.

Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality


Lynn Margulis - 1991
    A universally appealing subject presented with clarity, creativity, and conviction.--Booklist. Lynn Margulis is a leading evolutonary biologist and Sagan is a writer.

Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood


John Piper - 1991
    All main passages of Scripture that are relevant to the questions are considered.

When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics


Trinh T. Minh-ha - 1991
    In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the search by Western "experts" for the hidden values of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflicts with depth, while inner experience is reduced to mere personal feeling.When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

Women, AIDS & Activism


The ACT UP/NY Women & AIDS Book Group - 1991
    A thorough analysis of AIDS issues for women.

Rape and Representation


Lynn A. Higgins - 1991
    The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy.Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself.Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable.Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Copp'lia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory


Joan M. Gero - 1991
    In it, leading archaeologists from around the world contribute original analyses of prehistoric data to discover how gender systems operated in the past.

Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America since 1960


Flora Davis - 1991
    This book presents a grass-roots view of the small steps and giant leaps that have changed laws and institutions as well as the prejudices and unspoken rules governing a woman's place in American society.

Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism


Sara Mills - 1991
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles


Emily Martin - 1991
    

The Irigaray Reader


Luce Irigaray - 1991
    The Irigaray Reader is a collection of her most important paeprs to date, ranging across feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics. A number of them appear here for the first time in English.

Feminism Confronts Technology


Judy Wajcman - 1991
    Wajcman argues that the identification between men and machines is not immutable but is the result of ideological and cultural processes. She surveys sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed.Over the last two decades feminists have identified men's monopoly on technology as an important source of their power, women's lack of technological skills as an important element in their dependence on men. During this period, women's efforts to control their fertility have extended from abortion and contraception to mobilizing around the new reproductive technologies. At the same time there has been a proliferation of new technologies in the home and in the workplace. The political struggles emerging around reproductive technology, as well as the technologies affecting domestic work, paid labor, and the built environment, are the focus of this book.

Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law


Drucilla Cornell - 1991
    In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. In response to these movements, Beyond Accommodation strives to broaden the scope of feminist theory by articulating a platform, under the concept of relative universalism, which proposes the idea that women are not a unified and homogenous group although they are positioned as women in patriarchy. Cornell's theory allows for differences in women's situations without giving up on the idea that women are fighting a common phenomenon called patriarchy.

The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean Revolution


Amrit Wilson - 1991
    The book describes the course of the women's struggle for national liberation and women's emancipation in Eritrea.