Best of
Gender

2004

Caliban and the Witch


Silvia Federici - 2004
    Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization."It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism


Patricia Hill Collins - 2004
    In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

Undoing Gender


Judith Butler - 2004
    In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern and fail to govern gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

When Survivors Give Birth: Understanding and Healing the Effects of Early Sexual Abuse on Childbearing Women


Penny Simkin - 2004
    The authors expertly and compassionately address the unusual and distressing challenges that arise for abuse survivors during the childbirth experience. The first section informs the reader of the impact of early sexual abuse on children, adults, and on all aspects of childbearing. The second section teaches skills in communication, self-help skills, counseling and psychotherapy techniques. The third covers clinical challenges and solutions for doctors, nurses, midwives, doulas, and others. Case histories throughout the book clarify and apply the content.

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class


Michelle TeaLis Goldschmidt - 2004
    It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can’t go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet, to "jumping" class, how if time equals money then being poor means waiting, surviving and returning to the ghetto and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernández, Frances Varian, Tara Hardy, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Ryan, and more.

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject


Saba Mahmood - 2004
    Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice


Loretta J. Ross - 2004
    But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”—Lila Watson, Aboriginal ActivistVibrant. Strong. Fierce. Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf.Undivided Rights presents a fresh and textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement—strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women’s organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on “choice.”Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

Belonging: A Culture of Place


bell hooks - 2004
    Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home. hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South


Stephanie M.H. Camp - 2004
    Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition.Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties (frolics) become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation


Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreBenjamin Shepard - 2004
    This timely collection of essays by writers such as Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Charlie Anders, Benjamin Shepard, and others shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commoditized, and hyper objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," "Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay," and "Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?"

Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy


Ronald W. Pierce - 2004
    Such debate is still important, though, because this issue directly affects every member of Christ's body. What we believe the Bible teaches on these matters shapes nearly all we do in the church. In addition, these questions deserve further thought and reflection because neither side has won the day. In an effort to further discussion, Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (general editors), with the aid of Gordon D. Fee (contributing editor), have assembled a distinguished array of twenty-six evangelical scholars firmly committed to the authority of Scripture to explore the whole range of issues--historical, biblical, theological, hermeneutical and practical. While dispelling many of the myths surrounding biblical equality, they offer a sound, reasoned case that affirms the complementarity of the sexes without requiring a hierarchy of roles. Contributors include Ruth A. Tucker, Janette Hassey, Richard S. Hess, Linda L. Belleville, Aida Besancon Spencer, Craig S. Keener, I. Howard Marshall, Peter H. Davids, Walter L. Liefeld, Stanley J. Grenz, Kevin Giles, Roger Nicole, William J. Webb, Sulia Mason, Karen Mason, Joan Burgess Winfrey, Judith K. Balswick, Jack O. Balswick, Cynthia Neal Kimball, Mimi Haddad, Alvera Micklesen, R. K. McGregor Wright and Alice P. Mathews. Here is a fresh, positive defense of biblical equality that is at once scholarly and practical, irenic and yet spirited, up-to-date and cognizant of opposing positions.

Becoming a Visible Man


Jamison Green - 2004
    Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment.For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual people--as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others--enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences--including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery--the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.

Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex


Julia Sudbury - 2004
    The distinguished contributors to this collection offer a variety of perspectives, from former prisoners to advocates to scholars from around the world. The book is a must-read for anyone concerned by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex within and beyond U.S. borders, as well as those interested in globalization and resistance.

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People


Joan Roughgarden - 2004
    A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science—and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality.Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.

Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism


Hilda Gutiérrez Baldoquín - 2004
    Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles Johnson, Thich Nhat Hanh, and twenty-five other contributors share their unique perspectives on the fundamental Buddhist concepts of suffering and the path to the cessation of suffering. Together they represent the entire spectrum of Buddhist tradition.Thought-provoking and passionate, Dharma, Color, and Culture forges a new path in our understanding of the simple truths of Buddhism and their relevance for all of us. Essays by Latino, Asian, African-American, and Native American Buddhist practitioners, lay people, and Dharma teachers address the connection between diversity, racism, and Buddhism at four levels: the personal, the interpersonal, the institutional, and the cultural. Recognizing that attention to the pain of racism is essential, the overarching theme of this work is how the Dharma becomes an effective antidote to the suffering and a vehicle for healing and liberation.

The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire


Cynthia Enloe - 2004
    She proposes a distinctively feminist curiosity that begins with taking women seriously, especially during this era of unprecedented American influence. This means listening carefully, digging deep, challenging assumptions, and welcoming surprises. Listening to women in Asian sneaker factories, Enloe reveals, enables us to bring down to earth the often abstract discussions of the global economy. Paying close attention to Iraqi women's organizing efforts under military occupation exposes the false global promises made by officials. Enloe also turns the beam of her inquiry inward. In a series of four candid interviews and a new set of autobiographical pieces, she reflects on the gradual development of her own feminist curiosity. Describing her wartime suburban girlhood and her years at Berkeley, she maps the everyday obstacles placed on the path to feminist consciousness—and suggests how those obstacles can be identified and overcome. The Curious Feminist shows how taking women seriously also challenges the common assumption that masculinities are trivial factors in today's international affairs. Enloe explores the workings of masculinity inside organizations as diverse as the American military, a Serbian militia, the UN, and Oxfam. A feminist curiosity finds all women worth thinking about, Enloe claims. She suggests that we pay thoughtful attention to women who appear complicit in violence or in the oppression of others, or too cozily wrapped up in their relative privilege to inspire praise or compassion. Enloe's vitality, passion, and incisive wit illuminate each essay. The Curious Feminist is an original and timely invitation to look at global politics in an entirely different way.

Elena's Serenade


Campbell Geeslin - 2004
     But girls can't be glassblowers. Or can they? Join Elena on her fantastic journey to Monterrey -- home of the great glassblowers! -- in an enchanting story filled with magic realism.

Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families


Arlene Istar Lev - 2004
    Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families views assessment and treatment through a nonpathologizing lens that honors human diversity and acknowledges the role of oppression in the developmental process of gender identity formation.Specific sections of Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families address the needs of gender-variant people as well as transgender children and youth. The issues facing gender-variant populations who have not been the focus of clinical care, such as intersexed people, female-to-male transgendered people, and those who identify as bigendered, are also addressed.The book examines:the six stages of transgender emergencecoming out transgendered as a normative process of gender identity developmentthinking "outside the box" in the deconstruction of sex and genderthe difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as the convergence, overlap, and integration of these parts of the selfthe power of personal narrative in gender identity developmentetiology and typographies of transgenderismtreatment models that emerge from various clinical perspectivesalternative treatment modalities based on gender variance as a normative lifecycle developmental processComplete with fascinating case studies, a critique of diagnostic processes, treatment recommendations, and a helpful glossary of relevant terms, this book is an essential reference for anyone who works with gender-variant people. Handy tables and figures make the information easier to access and understand.Visit the author's Web site at http: //www.choicesconsulting.com

Heroic Australian Women In War


Susanna de Vries - 2004
    the brave deeds of women in war have long been overshadowed by male heroics. In this inspiring new book, renowned writer and historian Susanna de Vries profiles the grit, determination and selflessness of 11 outstanding Australian women serving in two World Wars: from Olive King, volunteer ambulance driver who saved countless lives in France and Serbia during World War I, to Vivian Bullwinkel, Joyce Twedell and Sylvia Muir, all three of whom endured years of starvation and cruelty on Bangka Island at the hands of their Japanese captors. Other women featured include Sister Alice Kitchen, Dr Agnes Bennett, Dr Lilian Cooper, Louise Mack, Joice Nankivell Loch, Mavis Parkinson and Sister May Hayman. these are all women who deserve to be known, recognised and celebrated alongside their male peers. In her informal, vivid style, de Vries focuses not only on the astounding courage these women displayed in battle, but also on their personal struggles and accomplishments - proving that they were each as influential and heroic in life as they were in war.

A Life of Unlearning – a preacher's struggle with his homosexuality, church and faith


Anthony Venn-Brown OAM - 2004
    For some, reality slaps them in the face - refusing to be ignored.On the surface, everything looked perfect. Anthony Venn-Brown was a popular, high-profile preacher in Australia's growing mega-churches, such as Hillsong, and happily married father-of-two. Behind the scenes was a different story. Believing homosexuality made him unacceptable to God and others, a secret battle was being fought. After twenty-two years of struggle and torment, a chance meeting forced Anthony to make the toughest decision of his life. Tired of feeling torn and fragmented, he confessed and came out. Abandoned by his church and Christian friends Anthony began his life of unlearning; a lonely journey that made him who he is today. This honest account highlights not only the costs of being true to yourself but that the rewards of authenticity and integrity are worth it. As Anthony's story is ultimately about being true to one's self - whether you're gay or straight, religious or non believer - you’ll find relevance in this triumphant autobiography.

The Panza Monologues


Virginia Grise - 2004
    Written, compiled, and collected by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga and fashioned into a tour-de-force solo performance, The Panza Monologues features the words of Chicanas speaking with humor and candor. Their stories boldly place the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and living conditions.This second edition of The Panza Monologues presents the performance script in its entirety, as well as a rich supporting cast of dramaturgical and pedagogical materials. These include a narrative history of the play’s development by the playwrights; critical materials that enhance and expand upon the script’s themes and ideas (a short introduction to San Antonio, where the play was developed; playwright autogeographies; and a manifesto on women of color making theater); and a selection of pedagogical and creative ideas, including guidelines and advice for staging a production of the play and for teaching it in the classroom, community-making activities (screenings, hosting “Panza Parties,” community/group discussions), and creative writing activities connected to the play.

Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place


Nirmal Puwar - 2004
    The spaces they come to occupy are not empty or neutral, but are imbued with history and meaning. This groundbreaking book interrogates the pernicious, subtle but nonetheless widely held view that certain bodies are naturally entitled to certain spaces, while others are not. How are positions of authority racialized and gendered? How do people manage their femininity and/or blackness while in a predominantly white male context? How do spaces become naturalized or normalized, and what does it mean when they are disrupted? Engaging with a range of material from a variety of institutions, Space Invaders is a timely contribution to wide-reaching debates on race, gender and space. It is the first book to articulate the full complexity of diversity in organizations.

The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's Rights and How to Fight Back


Gloria Feldt - 2004
    The War on Choice chronicles the actions being taken at the highest levels of government to turn back the clock on women's rights. With the White House acting in anti-choice lockstep with the majorities in both House and Senate, religious extremists are now in key decision-making posts, our federal judiciary is filled with recent appointees whose values are drastically out of step with the pro-choice sentiments of the majority of the American people, abstinence-only sex education is now the rule, ideology has trumped science in domestic and global health policy, and the Supreme Court balance in favor of reproductive freedoms is perilously close to toppling. But while many of the individual facts are known, no one until now has connected all the dots and drawn the Big Picture that shows exactly how radical and how successful this quiet revolution has been.Judge by judge, law by law, and appointee by appointee, The War on Choice speaks the truth about what is happening, and also tells the stories of some of the women whose lives have been affected by these court decisions and federal policies. A keen analysis of current events, combined with a hands-on plan of action for those who want to raise their voices in protest, this book will be riveting reading.And there is no one better equipped to write about the insidious, step-by step chipping away of rights, or about what we can do to fight back, than Gloria Feldt, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her thirty years of work with the organization combined with her personal experience - as a woman who came out of the same West Texas political landscape as did George W. Bush but faced a very different economic and social reality as the mother of three children by the age of 20 make her the ideal spokeswoman for those who are alarmed by the current political climate.?This book will be a wake-up call, describing in jaw-dropping detail the story of what the anti-choice movement is doing to the rights to birth control, abortion and privacy.?

On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics


Paul Verhaeghe - 2004
    Thus, the diagnosis of potential pathologies must also be founded on this relation. Given that the efficacy of all forms of treatment depends upon the therapeutic relation, a diagnostic of this sort has wide-ranging applications.Paul Verhaeghe's critical evaluation of the contemporary DSM-diagnostic shows that the lack of reference to an updated governing metapsychology impinges on the therapeutic value of the DSM categories. In response to this problem, the author sketches out the foundations of such a metapsychology by combining a Freudo-Lacanian approach with contemporary empirical research. Close attention is paid to the processes of identity acquisition to show how the self and the Other are not two separate entities. Rather, subject formation is seen as a process in which both the subject's and the Other's identity, as well as the relationship between them, comes into being.By engaging this new theoretical approach in a constant dialogue with the findings of contemporary research, this book provides a compass for the practical applications of such a differential diagnostic. Post-modern categories of anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders are approached both through the well-known neurotic, psychotic, and perverse structures, as well as through the less familiar distinction between an actual pathology and a psychopathology. These two outlooks, which involve the role of language and the subject's relation to the Other, are spelled out to show their implications for treatment at every turn.

Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy


Vanessa L. Fong - 2004
    What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the government's decision to accelerate the fertility transition.Only Hope shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.

The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey


Ayşe Gül Altınay - 2004
    Altinay examines how the myth that the military is central to Turkey's national identity was created, perpetuated, and acts to shape politics. This historical and anthropological investigation probes the genesis of the myth that the Turkish nation is a military nation, traces how the ideology of militarism has been actualized through education and conscription, and reveals the implications for ethnic and gender relations. Altinay sheds light both on the process of how national identities are constructed and on the deep roots of the challenges facing Turkey as it potentially moves from being a plural to a pluralistic society.

Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland


Linda J. Lumsden - 2004
    Moving in radical circles, she agitated for social change in the prewar years, and she epitomized the independent New Woman of the time. Her death at age 30 while stumping for suffrage in California in 1916 made her the sole martyr of the American suffrage movement. Her death helped inspire two years of militant protests by the National Woman's Party, including the picketing of the White House, which led in 1920 to ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Lumsden's study of this colorful and influential figure restores to history an important link between the homebound women of the 19th century and the iconoclastic feminists of the 1970s.

Freedom in this Village Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men's Writing


E. Lynn Harris - 2004
    Starting in 1979 with the publication of James Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head, then on to the radical writings of the 1980s, the breakthrough successes of the 1990s, and up to today's new works, editor E. Lynn Harris collects 47 sensational stories, poems, novel excerpts, and essays. Authors featured include Samuel R. Delany, Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, Marlon Riggs, Assotto Saint, Larry Duplechan, Reginald Shepherd, Carl Phillips, Keith Boykin, Randall Kenan, Thomas Glave, James Earl Hardy, Darieck Scott, Gary Fisher, Bruce Morrow, John Keene, G. Winston James, Bil Wright, Robert Reid Pharr, Brian Keith Jackson, as well as an array of exciting new and established writers.

Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls: A Coloring Book


Jacinta Bunnell - 2004
    32 original illustrations with captions like "Calvin, baking is fun and all, but we can make a rad drum set out of these pots and bowls" and "Don't let gender box you in" offer light-hearted, fun ways to deconstruct gender for both children and adults. The coloring book form is a subversive and playful way to examine how perversive stereotypes about gender are in every aspect of our lives, especially the ones that are so ingrained we don't even notice. Girls Will be Boys Will be Girls pokes fun at the tired constraints of gender normativity, and makes it okay to step outside the lines.

How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS


David Gere - 2004
    The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide?    Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also the protests conceived by ACT-UP and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.

This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace


Swanee Hunt - 2004
    . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how."—William Jefferson ClintonThis Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who founded a veterans’ aid group, a fashion designer running two nonprofit organizations, a government minister and professor who survived Auschwitz—these women are advocates, politicians, farmers, journalists, students, doctors, businesswomen, engineers, wives, and mothers. They are from all parts of Bosnia and represent the full range of ethnic traditions and mixed heritages. Their ages spread across sixty years, and their wealth ranges from expensive jewels to a few chickens. For all their differences, they have this much in common: all survived the war with enough emotional strength to work toward rebuilding their country. Swanee Hunt met these women through her diplomatic and humanitarian work in the 1990s. Over the course of seven years, she conducted multiple interviews with each one. In presenting those interviews here, Hunt provides a narrative framework that connects the women’s stories, allowing them to speak to one another.The women describe what it was like living in a vibrant multicultural community that suddenly imploded in an onslaught of violence. They relate the chaos; the atrocities, including the rapes of many neighbors and friends; the hurried decisions whether to stay or flee; the extraordinary efforts to care for children and elderly parents and to find food and clean drinking water. Reflecting on the causes of the war, they vehemently reject the idea that age-old ethnic hatreds made the war inevitable. The women share their reactions to the Dayton Accords, the end of hostilities, and international relief efforts. While they are candid about the difficulties they face, they are committed to rebuilding Bosnia based on ideals of truth, justice, and a common humanity encompassing those of all faiths and ethnicities. Their wisdom is instructive, their courage and fortitude inspirational.

105 Ways to Celebrate Menstruation


Kami McBride - 2004
    My favorite part of the book is Kami's suggestions for how to celebrate menstruation, 105 ways to be exact! This would be the perfect book for a young woman just entering her moon time, for a woman who is experiencing difficulty during menstruation or for any woman wishing to feel more empowered and creative during her monthly cycle. -ROSEMARY GLADSTARAuthor of Herbal Healing for Women and the Family HerbalMenstruation is not usually thought of as a time of honor or celebration. It is commonly called the curse, 'that dreaded time of the month', 'a bloody mess', 'on the rag' and other derogatory names. These names are a reflection of our thoughts and feelings about menstruation. When we reject a body function as something negative, dirty or insignificant, there is an energetic and psychological separation from that part of the body. The negative thought patterns associated with menstruation are indeed part of the reason why so many women experience unique combinations of over one hundred different symptoms and ailments categorized under PMS.We can develop a new way of thinking about menstruation. A way that creates positive thoughts and images in relation to this important body cycle. A way that allows us to truly love and accept our body just the way it is. We can learn to appreciate menstruation as something normal and healthy. When women don't feel like they have to 'do' something to hide or control this natural body function, they experience a greater sense of self esteem, well being and peace of mind.

Heterophobia


Ragan Fox - 2004
    This literary debut includes subtle and nuanced exercises that interrogate gender, violence, sexuality, and heteronormativity. Heterophobia is accessible, riotously funny, heart-breaking, and undeniably real.

Check it While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere


Gwendolyn D. Pough - 2004
    But although hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are still fighting for equality.In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women "bringing wreck." Pough demonstrates how influential women rappers such as Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women -- from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements -- to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past ("castrating black mother," "mammy," "sapphire") and the present ("bitch," "ho," "chickenhead"), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the ongoing public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. The author concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of rap music as well as of third wave and black feminism.This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to "bring wreck" on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.

New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism


Rachel Stein - 2004
    New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors.The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. The contributors represent a wide variety of activist and scholarly perspectives including law, environmental studies, sociology, political science, history, medical anthropology, American studies, English, African and African American studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies, offering multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism.Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts.

Dangerous Memories: A Mosaic of Mary in Scripture


Elizabeth A. Johnson - 2004
    Dangerous Memories is taken from her acclaimed Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (0-8264-1473-7), with the addition of a new introduction and a short annotated bibliography.

Red Threads: The South Asian Queer Connection in Photographs


Poulomi Desai - 2004
    The photographs in this book have appeared everywhere from Calcutta to New York, from fetish parties to the pristine whitewashed Photographer's Gallery, printed on posters promoting safe sex and projected onto walls. In full colour throughout, they show people who don't fit into any traditional social boxes: queer Asian Brits, queens in Bollywood drag, women in men's suits or naked on the streets of Britain.

Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities


Michael S. Kimmel - 2004
    The Handbook provides a broad view of masculinities primarily across the social sciences, with the inclusion of important debates in some areas of the humanities and natural sciences. The various approaches presented in this Handbook range across different disciplines, theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and conceptualizations in relation to the topic of men. Editors Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell have assembled an esteemed group of contributors who are among the best-known experts in their particular fields.

Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune


Carolyn J. Eichner - 2004
    It demonstrates the breadth, depth, and impact of communard feminist socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection. Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J. Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied politics subsequently affected fin-de-siecle gender and class relations. She focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own path to gender equality and social justice.

Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France


Jennifer M. Jones - 2004
    Yet, relegating fashion to the realm of frivolity and femininity is a distinctly modern belief that developed along with the urban culture of the Enlightenment. In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a courtly fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationships between women and commercial culture and between morality and taste. The story of how "la mode" was "sexed" as feminine offers compelling insights into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture. Jones examines men's and women's relation to fashion at this time, looking at both consumption and production to show the origins of the idea of shopping and fashion as specifically feminine.

Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews


Sonja Franeta - 2004
    The book is named after the Siberian queer film festival that took place in Tomsk in in 1996. Sonja Franeta, the interviewer, writer and translator, traveled extensively throughout Russia, from Khabarovsk to Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping in several Siberian cities to meet LGBT people and talk to them about their lives. Some interviewees spoke about their experiences as sexual minorities for the first time. People from Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk discussed how they were able to survive the secrecy and stigma of being queer. Men were put in prison camps and women institutionalized in psychiatric institutions during the Stalin years and after. Interviewees also talked about family backgrounds and changes in politics. This is the first book of its kind in Russia, documenting gay and lesbian and transgender stories in the voices of the people themselves.

Woman's Identity and the Qur'an: A New Reading


Nimat Hafez Barazangi - 2004
    Barazangi asserts that Muslim women have been generally excluded from full participation in Islamic society, and thus from full and equal Islamic identity, primarily because of patriarchal readings of the Qur'an and the entire range of early Qur'anic literature. Based on her study of the sacred text, she argues that Islamic higher learning is a basic human right, that women have equal authority to participate in the interpretation of Islamic primary sources, and that women will realize their just role in society and their potential as human beings only when they are involved in the interpretation of the Qur'an.        Barazangi offers a curricular framework for self-teaching that could prepare Muslim women for an active role in citizenship and policymaking in a pluralistic society by affirming the self-identity of the Muslim woman as an autonomous spiritual and intellectual human being.

Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob


Dora Apel - 2004
    Nice people, it is felt, do not talk about it, and they certainly do not look at images representing the atrocity.In Imagery of Lynching, Dora Apel contests this adopted stance of ignorance. Through a careful and compelling analysis of over one hundred representations of lynching, she shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for both constructing and challenging racial hierarchies. She examines how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera and how these images circulated on postcards, but also how they eventually were appropriated by antilynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She further investigates how photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," the role that gender played in these visual representations, and how interracial desire became part of the imagery.Offering the fullest and most systematic discussion of the depiction of lynching in diverse visual forms, this book addresses questions about race, class, gender, and dissent in the shaping of American society. Although we may want to avert our gaze, Apel holds it with her sophisticated interpretations of traumatic images and the uses to which they have been put.

Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development


Irene Tinker - 2004
    Yet the international development programs that grew in the mid-twentieth century largely ignored or bypassed women’s ideas, women’s rights, women’s work, and the realities of women’s lives. More often than not, these development projects served to reinforce patriarchal structures rather than to support or empower women. In Developing Power, women from around the world tell how they fought to ensure that the unprecedented political and economic changes in the developing world would benefit women as well as men.In these compelling testimonies, a distinguished group of 27 pioneering women from 12 countries tell their own stories, revealing the moments when they realized that they could challenge the received wisdom of the day, and the struggles involved in turning their ideas into actions. These varied accounts come from women involved in creating the four major UN conferences on women held from 1975 to 1995, women scholars, women in institutions that provide development funds, and women in development agencies. The stories in Developing Power reach beyond their individual contexts to provide a model for progressive social change.

Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women


Lucy Bolton - 2004
    Lucy Bolton compares these films with those which offer more standard — albeit provocative and interesting — treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, well-known films alongside the recent, experimental films illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create complex and provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Luce Irigaray in relation to women's cultivation of self-knowledge, this book examines each female character as she goes through a process of transition or transformation. This approach demonstrates how participating in the encounter between Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield greater understanding of both fields.

And Rachel Stole The Idols: The Emergence Of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing


Wendy I. Zierler - 2004
    This episode is the thematic key to Wendy Zierler's in-depth research of the ways modern Hebrew women writers--after centuries of silence--took control of the language of Hebrew literary culture, laying claim to icons of femininity and recasting them for their own purposes. Zierler picks up where other Hebrew scholars have left off, offering original analysis that brings feminist theory to bear on the study of modern Hebrew women writers. In recognition that there is no single feminist approach, nor a universally accepted definition of gender, this book incorporates a broad range of feminist reading strategies--including Anglo-American gynocriticism, French feminist theory, and feminist critical methods in anthropology, biblical studies, and geography. The chapters within examine the translated work of women who made early and significant contributions to nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Hebrew literature. These range from prose writers Sarah Feige Meinkin Foner, Hava Shapiro, Nechama Pukhachevsky, and Devorah Baron, to poets Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Yokheved Bat-Miriam, Esther Raab, Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir, Shulamit Kalugai, and Leah Goldberg. Along with its provocative scholarship and large number of original translations, And Rachel Stole the Idols makes a vital contribution to Jewish women's studies, in general, and Hebrew literary studies, in particular, as the first book-length English-language study of its kind.

Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap--And What Women Can Do about It


Warren Farrell - 2004
    Farrell clearly defines the 25 different workplace choices that affect women's and men's incomes -- including putting in more hours at work, taking riskier jobs or more hazardous assignments, being willing to change location, and training for technical jobs that involve less people contact -- and provides readers with specific, research-supported ways for women to earn higher pay.Why Men Earn More, with its brashness in the face of political correctness, is sure to ignite a storm of media controversy that will help to make this thoroughly pragmatic expose Warren Farrell's next bestseller."