Now the largest multiracial, grassroots, feminist organization in the United States, INCITE! boasts chapters in more than 20 cities. Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology presents the fierce and vital writing of 32 of these visionaries, who not only shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault, but also map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. At a time of heightened state surveillance and repression of people of color, Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology is an essential intervention.

    Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

    burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with a series of hard-edged, provocative short stories. Hailed as a brilliant masculine writer with a deep sympathy for his female characters, he penned such classics as Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and The Women Men Don't See. For years he corresponded with Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin. No one knew his true identity. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: A sixty-one-year old woman named Alice Sheldon. As a child, she explored Africa with her mother. Later, made into a debutante, she eloped with one of the guests at the party. She was an artist, a chicken farmer, a World War II intelligence officer, a CIA agent, an experimental psychologist. Devoted to her second husband, she struggled with her feelings for women. In 1987, her suicide shocked friends and fans. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award was created to honor science fiction or fantasy that explores our understanding of gender. This fascinating biography, ten years in the making, is based on extensive research, exclusive interviews, and full access to Alice Sheldon's papers.

    In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

    His book explains carefully and convincingly why--and how--men can become part of the solution, and work with women to build a world in which everyone is safer." --Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America, spokesperson, National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS)"If only men would read Katz's book, it could serve as a potent form of male consciousness-raising."--Publishers Weekly"This book leaves no man behind when it comes to taking violence against women personally....After reading this book you can see how important it is to be a stand-up guy and not a standy-by guy, no matter what race or culture you come from."--Alfred L. McMichael, 14th Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps and now serving as the Sergeant Major of NATO"A candid look at the cultural factors that lend themselves to tolerance of abuse and violence against women."--Booklist"These pages will empower both men and women to end the scourge of male violence and abuse. Katz knows how to cut to the core of the issues, demonstrating undeniably that stopping the degradation of women should be every man's priority."--Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

    The zine helps to define consent, some letters that Cindy has received, listening, talking about sex, power dynamics, comics by Fly, and much more! A crucial resource that reads much like a regular issue of Doris.

    Misogyny encompasses the Church, witch hunts, sexual theory, Nazism, pro-life campaigners, and finally, today's developing world, where women are increasingly and disproportionately at risk because of radicalized religious beliefs, famine, war, and disease. Extensively researched, highly readable and provocative, this book chronicles an ancient, pervasive and enduring injustice. The questions it poses deal with the fundamentals of human existence — sex, love, violence — that have shaped the lives of humans throughout history, and ultimately limn an abuse of human rights on a nearly unthinkable scale.

    Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka's civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high femme rebellions. Consensual Genocide celebrates our survival and marks our rebel memories into history.

    Magazine, Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism--and vice versa--and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.

    Exposing the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women, and its systemic condonation, this book takes us into the heart of the international law of conflict to ask - and reveal - why the international community can rally against terrorists' violence, but not against violence against women.

    In this ground-breaking, lucid, and carefully constructed work, feminist Muslim scholar Dr Kecia Ali asks how one can determine what makes sex lawful and ethical in the sight of God.Drawing on both revealed and interpretative Muslim texts, Ali critiques medieval and contemporary commentators alike to produce a balanced and comprehensive study of a subject both sensitive and urgent, making this an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and interested readers.

    At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions. A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.

    Avoiding preconceptions about ancient sexuality, he explores the ethics of desire and marriage and pays careful attention to the original meanings of words, especially those used as evidence of Paul's opposition to homosexuality. For example, after a remarkably faithful reading of the scriptural texts, Martin concludes that our contemporary obsession with marriage--and the whole search for the right sexual relationships--is antithetical to the message of the gospel. In all of these essays, however, Martin argues for engaging Scripture in a way that goes beyond the standard historical-critical questions and the assumptions of textual agency in order to find a faith that has no foundations other than Jesus Christ.

    In Witness, Amalia Mesa-Bains and bell hooks invite us to reexamine this politically popular binary and consider which differences are manufactured and which are real.In Witness, Mesa-Bains and hooks explore their own similarities and differences, sharing the ways their childhoods, families, and work have shaped their political activism, teaching, and artistic expression. Drawing on shared experiences of sexism, classism, and racism, hooks and Mesa-Bains show how people from divergent cultural backgrounds can work together for radical social change.While the black/Latino divide and the increasing cross-community political collaboration has been addressed in progressive newspapers and magazines, Witness, an inclusive call to reflect and act, is the first of its kind to look at these issues in depth. And Amalia Mesa-Bains, a pioneer scholar and producer of Chicana art, with bell hooks, one of the most acclaimed of African American theorists—prove an unparalleled match for the job.bell hooks is one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation. She has written extensively on the emotional impact of racism and sexism, particularly on black women, as well as the importance of political engagement with art and the media. In her recent work on love, relationships, and community, she shows how emotional health is a necessary component to effective resistance and activism.Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist, curator, and writer who has initiated comprehensive exhibitions of Latino art, including Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation and Mi Alma, Mi Tierra, Mi Gente: Contemporary Chicana Art. Her artwork incorporates various aspects of Chicano/a history, culture, and folk traditions, exploring religion, ritual, and female rites of passage. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.

    Offering spare, tightly executed essays, this slim volume nonetheless succeeds in creating a spectacular, well-researched compendium of the transgender movement." -Law Library JournalOver the past three decades, the transgender movement has gained visibility and achieved significant victories. Discrimination has been prohibited in several states, dozens of municipalities, and more than two hundred private companies, while hate crime laws in eight states have been amended to include gender identity. Yet prejudice and violence against transgender people remain all too common. With analysis from legal and policy experts, activists and advocates, Transgender Rights assesses the movement’s achievements, challenges, and opportunities for future action. Examining crucial topics like family law, employment policies, public health, economics, and grassroots organizing, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable resource in the fight for the freedom and equality of those who cross gender boundaries. Moving beyond media representations to grapple with the real lives and issues of transgender people, Transgender Rights will launch a new moment for human rights activism in America. Contributors: Kylar W. Broadus, Judith Butler, Mauro Cabral, Dallas Denny, Taylor Flynn, Phyllis Randolph Frye, Julie A. Greenberg, Morgan Holmes, Bennett H. Klein, Jennifer L. Levi, Ruthann Robson, Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Dean Spade, Kendall Thomas, Paula Viturro, Willy Wilkinson. Paisley Currah is associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute. Richard M. Juang cochairs the advisory board of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, DC. He has taught at Oberlin College and Susquehanna University. He is the lead editor of NCTE's Responding to Hate Crimes: A Community Resource Manual and coeditor of Transgender Justice, which explores models of activism.Shannon Price Minter is legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

    Who would have guessed that all of our sexual and social behavior, and even our physical appearance, could be attributed to what our tiny unseen reproductive cells are doing? But that's Quirk's thesis in this highly entertaining book from an Average Guy that's a fun read full of a-ha! moments for scientists and civilians alike. Learn facts about cheating you'll never see on "Jerry Springer," like how unfaithful females actually change the biology of their mates. Discover why most sperm couldn't care less if they never saw an egg, what makes men yell "woo!" in a feminine falsetto--very similar to the mating cry of the Siamang gibbon--and, most important, the surprising answer on what to wear to attract that alpha mate.

    As activist and writer Cristina Page shows, the gains made by birth-control advocates (historically) and pro-choice organizations (currently) have formed the bedrock of freedoms few Americans would choose to live without. Now, not only is the future of legal abortion far from guaranteed, in many parts of the country ready access to many forms of contraception is in jeopardy as well. And that development, Page argues, should have everyone, regardless of moral or political persuasion, deeply concerned. For these basic freedoms are not just for the freewheeling gals of "Sex and the City," but are central to the lives of working mothers and fathers from Phoenix to Duluth, churchgoers and nonbelievers alike. Page crystallizes the thoughts and attitudes of a generation of women and men whose voices are seldom heard in the political arena. How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America is the first book to address the positive transformation our society has undergone because of our ability to plan when and if to have children. It also exposes the anti-choice movement's far-reaching-and dangerous-agenda. Fresh, bold, and stocked with counterintuitive arguments, this is a book bound to form the basis for heated conversations nationwide.

    By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.

    Cross-Genre.Wildly absorbing, MURMUR is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir (and autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. This is one fabulous book!--Rikki DucornetLaura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. MURMUR is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget.--Renee GladmanMURMUR collects an astonishing array of sorties into language as a terra incognita occasioning the uncanny and always troubled confluence of the subject, the bodies it inhabits and the linguistic remainder. Mullen animates narrative at the level of its basic semantic pulse. You'll meet a talking corpse, a severed head, a heart drawn on an open palm and the gradual destruction of a face. Mullen is as much an expert in the comic and grotesque, as in the restless and anonymous. With a majestically controlled impatience she constructs a textual space both unnerving and familiar. These are splendid texts of the nameless ones (a 'messenger, ' the 'caller, ' the 'reader') who interrupt and witness the murmur of the linked deictic shadows of a recurring 'she' and 'he.' Never since Beckett has the unnamed been so chilling precisely because it is unnameable.--Steve McCafferyLaura Mullen's MURMUR finds the crime in the moments between actions, in language overheard, doubling back, in a style both unnerving and comforting; always midsentence we feel death never dying, 'real despite or because of the staging, ' and in the background, Duras, Hitchcock--the passions of mundane horrors always ready for our pleasure, discovery. MURMUR stays the mind like an unforgettable dream.--Thalia Field

    A one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive outside the box, Hello, Cruel World is a much-needed unconventional approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, but alive.Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 101 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the highly controversial. Designed to encourage readers to give themselves permission to unleash their hearts' harmless desires, the book has only one directive: "Don't be mean." It is this guiding principle that brings its reader on a self-validating journey, which forges wholly new paths toward a resounding decision to choose life.Tenderly intimate and unapologetically edgy, Kate Bornstein is the radical role model, the affectionate best friend, and the guiding mentor all in one.

    Wekker vividly describes the lives of these women, who prefer to create alternative families of kin, lovers, and children, and gives a fascinating account of women's sexuality that is not limited to either heterosexuality or same-sex sexuality. She offers new perspectives on the lives of Caribbean women, transnational gay and lesbian movements, and an Afro-Surinamese tradition that challenges conventional Western notions of marriage, gender, identity, and desire. Bringing these women's voices to the forefront, she offers an extensive and groundbreaking analysis of the unique historical, religious, psychological, economic, linguistic, cultural, and political forces that have shaped their lives.

    Approaching the topic from varying perspectives — exile, longing, belonging, diaspora, idealization — they show that “homeland” isn't just a physical place. It can also be an imagined community, a part of one's identity, or simply a wavering memory. It’s a world we create and re-create every day.Among the contributors are Etel Adnan, who describes her life as an exile from Beruit after choosing to leave a city at war. Agate Nesaule, who as a youngster left Latvia under Nazi and Soviet threat, writes of envying a young Latvian girl's life, rich in place, language, and music. Sarah McCormic echoes the experience of many “American mutts” who can claim so many heritages that they feel a connection to none.The writers in this collection beautifully capture the complicated notion of homeland and reflect the diversity of women's realities in the world.

    Charting the course of womanist theory from its genesis as Alice Walker's African-American feminism, through Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi's African womanism and Clenora Hudson-Weems' Africana womanism, to its present-day expression as a global, anti-oppressionist perspective rooted in the praxis of everyday women of color, this interdisciplinary reader traces the rich and diverse history of a quarter century of womanist thought. Featuring selections from over a dozen disciplines by top womanist scholars from around the world, plus several critiques of womanism, an extensive bibliography of womanist sources, and the first ever systematic treatment of womanist thought on its own terms, Layli Phillips has assembled a unique and groundbreaking compilation.

    As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre’s 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published.Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.

    After seeing a ballet performance, Nate decides he wants to learn ballet but he has doubts when his brother Ben tells him that only girls can be ballerinas.

    In a radical break with the Freudian school that dominated psychology, Gilligan and her peers went on to identify relationships rather than the notion of "self" as the foundation of our psychological and physical states. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Christina Robb recounts the untold efforts of a pioneering group of psychologists--Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman--whose groundbreaking work really did change everything.

    It examines a wide range of texts, including literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and popular cultural genres from the late imperial period to the beginning of the socialist era. It traces the process by which love became an all-pervasive subject of representation and discourse, as well as a common language in which modern notions of self, gender, family, sexuality, and nation were imagined and contested.Winner of the Association for Asian Studies 2009 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the best English-language academic book on post-1900 China

    Caught between the most extreme medicalization -- best seen in a Cesarean section rate of nearly 30 percent -- and a rhetoric of women's choices and the natural, women and their midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses labor on. Laboring On offers the voices of all of these practitioners, all women trying to help women, as they struggle with this increasingly split vision of birth.Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic In Labor, the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States, Laboring On gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America.

    Lola Alvarez Bravo explored her calling through photojournalism, commercial work and professional portrait-making, even as she was creating intensely personal images of people, places and things throughout her native Mexico. In addition, she played a vital role in the Mexican cultural scene as an inspiring teacher, a friend of innumerable artists (many of whom she photographed), and as the owner of a prestigious gallery that presented the first solo show by her friend Frida Kahlo, the subject of some of Alvarez Bravo's most powerful portraits. Although some of her photographs reflect the influence of her husband, Manuel Alvarez Bravo they shared the same cameras and often the same roll of film Lola had achieved her own aesthetic by the 1940s and 50s, concentrating on two particularly vivid bodies of work, portraiture and street photography. In these two disciplines she found a way to reveal a lyricism in the world around her, producing quiet reveries on life lived in the moment. This first English-language book to encompass the full range of her work includes previously unpublished images and several of her little-known photomontages."

    Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.

    Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues. One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.

    nation-state that privileges the propertied individual. However, African American, Asian American, and Chicano people experience the same stretch of city sidewalk with varying degrees of safety, visibility, and surveillance.The Ruptures of American Capital examines two key social formations—women of color feminism and racialized immigrant women’s culture—in order to argue that race and gender are contradictions within the history of U.S. capital that should be understood not as monolithic but as marked by its crises. Hong shows how women of color feminism identified ways in which nationalist forms of capital, such as the right to own property, were repressive. The Ruptures of American Capital demonstrates that racialized immigrant women’s culture has brought to light contested modes of incorporation into consumer culture.Interweaving discussion of U.S. political economy with literary analyses (including readings from Booker T. Washington to Jessica Hagedorn) Hong challenges the individualism of the United States and the fetishization of difference that is one of the markers of globalization.Grace Kyungwon Hong is assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

    Moving beyond biographies of famous noble women of the middles ages, the scope of this important reference work is vast and provides a comprehensive understanding of medieval women's lives and experiences. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Entries that range from 250 words to 4,500 words in length thoroughly explore topics in the following areas:- Art and Architecture- Countries, Realms, and Regions- Daily Life- Documentary Sources- Economics- Education and Learning- Gender and Sexuality- Historiography- Law- Literature- Medicine and Science- Music and Dance- Persons- Philosophy- Politics- Political Figures- Religion and Theology- Religious Figures- Social Organization and StatusWritten by renowned international scholars, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe is the latest in the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be an invaluable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

    Woolf and Sackville-West produced some of the most vibrant and acclaimed work of their respective careers during their passionate affair, and Sproles demonstrates how this body of work was a collaborative project - a partnership - in which they promised to reinvent one another.Sproles argues that in all they wrote during their affair - essays, criticism, novels, poems, biographies, and personal etters - Woolf and Sackville-West struggled to represent their desire for one another and to resist the social pressures that would deny their passion. At the centre of this literary conversation is Orlando, Woolf's biography of Sackville-West. Sproles restores Orlando to the context of Woolf and Sackville-West's discussion of gender and sexuality and demonstrates its importance in Woolf's oeuvre. Sexy and provocative, Desiring Women re-imagines Woolf and Sackville-West as daring, funny, beautiful, and bent on resisting the repression of women's desires.

    Each picture, taken by a well-known photographer, captures bald women too intent on work or play to be bashful about their looks--among others, Melissa Etheridge belts out a Janis Joplin tune at the 2005 Grammys, a rodeo cowgirl poses with the cowboys, a surfer climbs a wave in Hawaii, and a nun scrutinizes her poker hand. A foreword and afterword by the author describe the genesis of the book, her own experience with cancer and hair loss, and the brave women who posed for pictures. Photo credits and profiles are provided for the photographers, who include Eddie Adams, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Reuben Cox, Rob Gauthier, Lauren Greenfield, David Hume Kennerly, Antonin Kratchovil, Harry Langdon, Gerd Ludwig, Jay Maisel, Catherine Opie, Harvey Stein, Nick Vedros, and Annie Wells.

     written accessibly by one of the field's foremost researchers explores the ways in which gender contributes to the interpretation of meaning in workplace interaction uses original and insightfully analyzed data to focus on the ways in which both women and men draw on gendered discourse resources to enact a range of workplace roles illustrates how a qualitative analysis of workplace discourse can throw light on the many ways in which workplace discourse provides a resource for constructing gender identity as one component of our complex socio-cultural identity

    criminal justice system is well documented. Far less well-documented are the entrenched systems and beliefs that shape punishment and other official forms of social control today. In Race, Gender, and Punishment, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them. The essays unearth troubling evidence that testifies to the nation's brutally racist past, and to white Americans' continued fear of and suspicion about racial and ethnic minorities. The legacy of slavery on punishment is considered, but also subjects that have received far less attention such as how colonizers' notions of cultural superiority shaped penal practices, the criminalization of reproductive rights, the link between citizenship and punishment, and the global export of crime control strategies. Uncomfortable but necessary reading, this book provides an original critique of why and how the criminal justice system has emerged as such a racist institution.

    Although the term 'honeymoon' was coined in the eighteenth century, the ritual increased in popularity throughout the Victorian period, until by the end of the century it became a familiar accompaniment to the wedding for all but the poorest classes. Using letters and diaries of 61 real-life honeymooning couples, as well as novels from Frankenstein to Middlemarch that feature honeymoon scenarios, Michie explores the cultural meanings of the honeymoon, arguing that, with its emphasis on privacy and displacement, the honeymoon was central to emerging ideals of conjugality and to ideas of the couple as a primary social unit.

    It includes a specially commisssioned work of fiction, `Iphigeneia's Wedding', by the poet Elizabeth Cook.

    This brief text is suitable for courses with coverage of gender and sexuality in sociology, psychology, women's and gender studies, and human development. The only book of its kind to address sexualities from a social perspective, Plante's analysis of the context of sexuality, sexual behaviors, and identities is both intelligent and readable. With contemporary topics, such as 'hooking up,' sexual fantasies, and bisexualities, along with examples of how to apply critical thinking, students are empowered to think outside their comfort zones and encouraged to explore the topic of sex in a new context. Employing useful pedagogical features like end-of-chapter questions and suggested projects, this is the ideal text to help students see that sex is not only personal but social and political as well.

    They held community dialogues, rantfests, and Red Tent gatherings. This joyful call-to-arms by young women warriors collects the best of those events. We Got Issues! showcases a new feminine generation as they speak honestly and courageously about the 10 most important issues facing young women today, from money and racism, to relationships and motherhood. Each chapter frames a particular issue socially, culturally, and politically. A diverse range of rants, poems, and monologues are accompanied by an inspiring portrait of a woman warrior, "rituals of empowerment," quotes, statistics, and trends. Powerful black-and-white images capture these spiritual descendents of Eve Ensler, Alice Walker, Jane Fonda, and other old-schoolers acting up, acting out, and demanding change.

    However, as Durba Ghosh argues in a challenge to the existing historiography, anxieties about social status, appropriate sexuality, and the question of who could be counted as 'British' or 'Indian' were constant concerns of the colonial government even at this time. By following the stories of a number of mixed-race families, at all levels of the social scale, from high-ranking officials and noblewomen to rank-and-file soldiers and camp followers, and also the activities of indigenous female concubines, mistresses and wives, the author offers a fascinating account of how gender, class and race affected the cultural, social and even political mores of the period. The book makes an original and signal contribution to scholarship on colonialism, gender and sexuality.

    Offering a shameless and thrilling archive of radical queer sexuality, these photographs span from 1978 to the present day.

    Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

    From Nasra Abubakar, a Somalian camel-farmer’s daughter who is the first in her family to go to college to Anita Khemka, who reflects on the generation gap between yesterday’s and today’s teenage women in urban India, the young women in this book will inspire and encourage you to take action to transform your own life and the world around you.Enlightening, uplifting, challenging, and funny, Imagining Ourselves demonstrates the power of each individual life and the collective power of today’s generation of women as a whole.

    In this thoroughly updated edition, the editors focus critical attention on the need to enhance our understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clients. They incorporate new and emerging areas of scholarship and reflect on implications of recent changes in our society, including political struggles for gay civil unions, marriage, and adoption rights. This volume focuses on the complex cultural contexts of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and explores how to provide them with effective psychotherapy across a range of presenting concerns.

    We are repelled, yet mesmerized, by the emerging details of cases such as Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Annually, hundreds of infants and young children perish at the hands of their mothers. How could a mother destroy the first and most fundamental relationship we experience?In Why Mothers Kill: A Forensic Psychologist's Casebook, Geoffrey R. McKee, Ph.D. uses more than a dozen case studies from his 29-year forensic psychological evaluation practice to help us, and most importantly, prevent these horrific events from occurring. He applies current research findings to analyze, explain, and suggest practical interventions to alter the personal, familial, and situational circumstances that may influence some mothers to kill. With an emphasis on prevention, Dr. McKee sets out specific strategies that might have been employed at various risk intervention points occurring before the child's death.Through the use of extended narratives the author brings to life the thoughts and emotions experienced by women in each of the five categories of mothers he has identified from his years of practice. Additionally, the author presents the Maternal Filicide Risk Matrix which he developed to help mental health and medical professionals determine the risk and protective factors that lead mothers to kill their children.Students, as well as mental health and medical professionals will find this an important and unique resource.

    Bush administration in terms of their impact on women in the United States and abroad. Surprisingly, this is a largely ignored aspect of Bush's presidency, even though his policies have in many ways reversed or inhibited women's progress over the past three decades. While the media have focused on his opposition to abortion, Bush's less-publicized anti-feminist agenda has in fact been much more extensive. He has opposed women's interests in multiple ways, from shutting down women's offices in the government to de-funding programs that assist women, from opposing global women's rights treaties to supporting anti-feminist organizations. Contrary to his public claims that 'W stands for Women,' his policies, appointments and actions reveal a strongly patriarchal bent. This book also includes a chapter on the negative effects on women of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that emerged was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated by other women as they emerged from the "inner quarters" of traditional Chinese society.Many Chinese visitors and sojourners were drawn to the Foreign Settlements. Men of letters seeking a living outside of the government bureaucracy found work in the Settlements' burgeoning print industry and formed the new class of urban intellectuals. Courtesans fled from oppressive treatment and the turmoil of uprisings elsewhere in China and found unprecedented freedom in Shanghai to redefine themselves and their profession.As the entertainment industry developed, publications sprang up to report on and promote it. Journalists and courtesans found that their interests increasingly coincided, and the Settlements became a cosmopolitan playground. Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public, they introduced modern notions of love and romance that were radically at odds with the traditional roles of men and women. Yet because social change arrived in the form of entertainment, it met with little resistance.Yeh shows how this fortuitous combination of people and circumstances, rather than official decisions or acts, created the first multicultural modern city in China. With illustrations from newspapers, novels, travel guides, and postcards, as well as contemporary written descriptions of life in foreign-driven, fast-paced, cutting-edge Shanghai, this study traces the mutual influences among courtesans, intellectuals, and the city itself in creating a modern, market-oriented leisure culture in China. Historians, literary specialists, art critics, and social scientists will welcome this captivating foray into the world of late nineteenth-century popular culture.

    This is the definitive reevaluation of one of the giants of filmdom.

    Focusing on a phenomenon commonly called "women's language," in modern Japanese society, Miyako Inoue considers the history and social effects of this language form. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary Tokyo corporation to study the everyday linguistic experience of white-collar females office workers and on historical research from the late nineteenth century to 1930, she calls into question the claim that "women's language" is a Japanese cultural tradition of ancient origin and offers a critical geneaology showing the extent to which this language form is, in fact, a cultural construct linked with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Her theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, interdisciplinary work brilliantly illuminates the relationship between culture and language, the nature of power and subject formation in modernity, and how the complex nexus of gender, language, and political economy are experienced in everyday life.

    Wade, the supreme court case that legalized abortion in 1973.Abortion Under Attack addresses a spectrum of personal and social influences, ranging from dealing with remorse to the impact that economics, race, and culture have on a woman's right to choose. Krista Jacob, longtime advocate for reproductive rights and former abortion counselor, has compiled an impressive collection of writings by a diverse group of pro-choice activists who go beyond the same old analysis of reproductive rights to present the current issues facing the pro-choice movement. Feminist activist Amy Richards challenges supporters of reproductive rights to adopt language that strips conservatives of their moral authority as defenders of �life.” Author Laura Fraser writes about the dangers of a government that restricts Mifepristone, a drug that has proven effective in treating fibroids, endometriosis, and depression, because of its controversial use in terminating pregnancies. Gloria Feldt, the former President of Planned Parenthood, writes about how her personal experiences led to her role as a leader in the fight for reproductive justice, and offers strategies for preserving legal abortion.

    Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young believe that this reveals a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class. They argue that ideological feminism is silently reshaping law, public policy, education, and journalism. "Legalizing Misandry" offers lively and compelling evidence to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this new thinking -- from the courts, classrooms, government committees, and corporate bureaucracies to laws and policies affecting employment, marriage, divorce, custody, sexual harassment, violence, and human rights.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    The Redemption of Love reveals what the Bible has to say about these issues by applying the growing economic study of religion. Using Genesis, Jesus, Paul, and the Song of Songs, Carrie Miles outlines a consistent description of biblical love throughout Scripture, asserting that it is the only effective solution in today's battle to save marriage and family. This book is a valuable tool for clergy and laypeople.

    A pioneer throughout her life, she was an early activist in the civil rights movement; a professor of law at Brandeis, a poet and author of two acclaimed memoirs, a cofounder of the National Organization of Women; and finally at age 66, the first African-America woman ordained in the Episcopal Church.

    By combining an impressive command of Chinese and Western literary as well as film source materials with a sophisticated mode of analysis and an unassuming argumentative style, he has authored an exhilarating book--one that not only treats cinematic representations of male homosexuality with great sensitivity but also demonstrates what it means to read with critical intelligence and vision. --Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown UniversityCelluloid Comrades is a timely demonstration of the importance of queer studies in the field of transnational Chinese cinemas. Lim dissects gay sexuality in selective Chinese-language films, and vigorously contests commonly accepted critical paradigms and theoretical models. Readers will find a provocative, powerful voice in this new book. --Sheldon H. Lu, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California at DavisCelluloid Comrades offers a cogent analytical introduction to the representation of male homosexuality in Chinese cinemas within the last decade. It posits that representations of male homosexuality in Chinese film have been polyphonic and multifarious, posing a challenge to monolithic and essentialized constructions of both 'Chineseness' and 'homosexuality.' Given the artistic achievement and popularity of the films discussed here, the position of 'celluloid comrades' can no longer be ignored within both transnational Chinese and global queer cinemas. The book also challenges readers to reconceptualize these works in relation to global issues such as homosexuality and gay and lesbian politics, and their interaction with local conditions, agents, and audiences.Tracing the engendering conditions within the film industries of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Song Hwee Lim argues that the emergence of Chinese cinemas in the international scene since the 1980s created a public sphere in which representations of marginal sexualities could flourish in its interstices. Examining the politics of representation in the age of multiculturalism through debates about the films, Lim calls for a rethinking of the limits and hegemony of gay liberationist discourse prevalent in current scholarship and film criticism. He provides in-depth analyses of key films and auteurs, reading them within contexts as varied as premodern, transgender practice in Chinese theater to postmodern, diasporic forms of sexualities.Informed by cultural and postcolonial studies and critical theory, this acutely observed and theoretically sophisticated work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students as well as general readers looking for a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese cultural politics, cinematic representations, and queer culture.

    Virtually absent from these accounts is an examination of the central role that gender, race, class, and sexuality play in the war on terror. This lack of attention reflects a continued resistance by analysts to acknowledge and engage identity-related social issues as central elements within global politics. As this conflict grows, spreads and deepens, it is more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are using the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized inter/national relations. This book examines the official war stories being told to the international community about why and against whom the war on terror is being waged. The book is intended for students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of international relations, women's studies and cultural studies.

    Everywhere, this trend has raised two central questions related to the children of working mothers: Should mothers of young children work outside the home at all? And if so, who bears responsibility for assuring the care and well-being of their children? Comparing the various policy choices made across France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States, the book shows that there are differences in the extent to which societies accept both the idea of working mothers and the role of the state in shaping gender roles and children's lives.Morgan employs a comparative historical approach that focuses on three time periods: the late nineteenth century, the era of rapid welfare state expansion from 1945 to 1975, and the period of seeming welfare state stagnation since the mid-1970s. The author shows how, starting in the nineteenth century, religion influenced political development in the four countries the book studies. Historic patterns of church-state relations and conflicts over religion affected ideologies about gender roles and the family, as well as the way religious forces would be incorporated into political life. These forces shaped welfare policy between 1945 and 1975, a critical time for social policy expansion. During this period, socially conservative forces in countries such as the Netherlands and the United States blocked policies that would encourage mothers to work, while the weakness of these forces enabled such policies in both Sweden and France. Morgan concludes that these policy decisions have had an enduring impact, in part because the expansion of the welfare state has been curtailed since the 1970s.

    Arranged thematically, this book covers major developments in Anglo-American feminist linguistics, and Cameron's responses to these, spanning the last twenty years.The collection's overarching theme is the political relationship between language and gender: four distinctly themed sections demonstrate that a variety of forces affect gender relations, and gender representations, in different times and places. Cameron examines the connections between language and the (mis)representation of reality, and the role language plays in reproducing gender inequalities. More recent articles focus on representations of men and women as communicators, as well as the impact of sexuality on gender and gender relations, an increasingly prominent area of the author's research.This timely study brings much of Cameron's work together for the first time, and highlights characteristics of her work with which many readers will be familiar: a combination of linguistic and feminist political orientation; and a distinct focus on conflict in gender relations. Including a new introductory essay and eleven articles, three of which are previously unpublished, with short introductions to contextualize each piece, the collection is extremely useful for students and teachers on a variety of courses including English language and linguistics, women's studies, gender studies and communication studies.

    In Amazon Grace, Daly weaves quantum theory with radical feminism and challenges women to see themselves as Life-Savers and Life-Enhancers during the current Global Ecological Collapse. Discussing nanotechnology, the eugenics movement, and the strength of Wild Women on Earth, Daly offers her fans yet another fascinating, unique, quixotic, and confrontational view of the world in which we live.

    . . . a superb reading of Haiti's political culture and its impact on the street child's daily life as lived in a culture of violence for them and other citizens of this nation state."--Philip L. Kilbride, Bryn Mawr CollegeIn this ethnographic analysis of the cultural lives of children who are "sleeping rough" in Port-au-Prince, Kovats-Bernat expands the traditional bounds of anthropological thought, which have only recently permitted a scholarly treatment of "the child" as a valuable informant, relevant witness, and active agent of social change. Refuting the commonplace notion that street children are unsocialized, Hobbesian mongrels, the author finds these children adopt strategies to carve a social and cultural space for themselves on the contested streets of Port-au-Prince, individually and collectively playing a surprisingly vital role in Haiti's civic life as they shape their own complex political, economic, and cultural identities.Kovats-Bernat conducted his fieldwork from 1994 to 2004--the violent decade of Haiti's transition from a dictatorship to a democracy. Witnessing firsthand the effects of political and civil violence and poverty on the cultural lives of the Haitian people as well as the 2004 uprising of rebel soldiers against the government, he saw the Haitian president ousted and yet another violent transfer of political power in Haiti. The book also draws on the author's experience living on the streets with scores of street children, as well as their encounters with paramilitary agents, national policemen, former Haitian army soldiers, aid and development workers, United Nations and U.S. officials, the deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, death squad members, and Vodou bush priests.This comprehensive, accessible account of the social and cultural worlds inhabited by dispossessed children in Haiti is recommended for anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of Latin American, Haitian, and Caribbean studies.J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat is assistant professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College.

    The book concentrates on Spivak's engagement, in theory and practice, with deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and issues of postcoloniality and globalization, and makes clear the extent of her impact in the fields of postcolonial and literary theory. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker.

    Vivante explores women's lives in four ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. While the experiences of women in ancient cultures were certainly very different from those of most women today, a tendency to focus too much on negative or restrictive images has until now provided readers with a rather incomplete picture. Looking at this important era from a female-oriented perspective, Vivante widens the perceptual lens and makes it possible to highlight the fundamental empowered aspects of women's activities in order to present them in balance with the various limits imposed on their societal participation.Beginning with powerful images of goddesses and women's roles in the religious sphere, Vivante details the foundation for women's activities in all other social realms. While these four Mediterranean civilizations were distinctive, they also influenced each other through various forms of contact--trade, colonization, and war. Both the similarities and the differences permit richer comparisons and promote a deeper understanding of the lives of women in each.

    Whether she's coming undone or coming out the writing is authentic and passionate.

    Celebrate Madison's 150th birthday as women born between 1915 and 1957 reminisce about growing up here. Meet their families and friends, enjoy their pastimes, and ultimately follow them through their experience of an adventure everyone shares--coming of age at a particular place and time, receiving its stamp on one's character, values, and ambitions. These moving, entertaining first-person accounts gleaned from oral history interviews with women from a wide range of backgrounds reveal the changing nature of Madison over time.

    Freedman teaches and writes about women's history with a passion informed by her feminist values. Over the past thirty years, she has produced a body of work in which scholarship and politics have never been mutually exclusive. This collection brings together eleven essays--eight previously published and three new--that document the evolving relationship between academic feminism and political feminism as Freedman has studied and lived it.Following an introduction that presents a map of the personal and intellectual trajectory of Freedman's work, the first section of essays, on the origins and strategies of women's activism in U.S. history, reiterates the importance of valuing women in a society that has long devalued their contributions. The second section, on the maintenance of sexual boundaries, explores the malleability of both sexual identities and sexual politics. Underlying the collection is an inquiry into the changing meanings of gender, sexuality, and politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with a concern for applying the insights of women's history broadly, from the classroom to the courthouse.

    Politicians and journalists across the ideological spectrum eagerly denounce “victimism.” Accusations of “playing the victim” have become a convenient way to ridicule or condemn. President George W. Bush even blamed an Islamic “culture of victimization” for 9/11. The Cult of True Victimhood shows how the panic about domestic and foreign victims has transformed American politics, warping the language we use to talk about suffering and collective responsibility.With forceful and lively prose, Alyson Cole investigates the ideological underpinnings, cultural manifestations, and political consequences of anti-victimism in an array of contexts, including race relations, the feminist movement, conservative punditry, and the U.S. legal system. Being a victim, she contends, is no longer a matter of injuries or injustices endured, but a stigmatizing judgment of individual character. Those who claim victim status are cast as shamefully passive or cynically manipulative. Even the brutalized Central Park jogger came forth to insist that she is not a victim, but a survivor.Offering a fresh perspective on major themes in American politics, Cole demonstrates how this new use of “victim” to derogate underlies seemingly disparate social and political debates from the welfare state, criminal justice, and abortion to the war on terror.

    

    While other anthologies often separate race, class, and gender into distinct components, this anthology frames each reading within an analysis of all three cultural forces. Additionally, the intersection of sexuality with gender, race, and class is highlighted throughout the text. A collection of work by both U.S. and international writers, the text begins with a historical section that brings the past into contemporary focus. Section Two features personal narratives that make research and theoretical material immediately relevant to students. Other sections address family and community relationships, institutions, privilege, activism, and new sociological perspectives. Brief introductions frame each reading, and discussion questions spark student interest and enhance their understanding of the material.

    It recounts the complex experiences through which this formative theologian came to renounce the compulsive sexual practice of his youth, reinvesting his attention and affection in a disciplined spirituality. The Confessions is explicitly about desire, longing, passion - physical and spiritual - constantly both, and both most evidently when Augustine most intended to distinguish spiritual from physical. It is an erotic text, preoccupied with bodies, pleasures, and pains. It narrates Augustine's desperate attempt to get, and to keep, the greatest degree of pleasure. Even his conversion to Catholic Christianity is narrated as a seduction to continence, and the model of spirituality he articulated relied intimately and profoundly on his sexual experience. Desire and Delight explores the erotics of asceticism as described by Augustine, noticing the gendered foundation of his model of spiritual aspiration. Going beyond the tormented, self-conscious Augustine of conventional interpretations, one discovers in this book a man impelled by the eros that defines human beings as such: the pursuit up the scale of pleasures to the ultimate Pleasure. The pursuit is analyzed here in text, context, and subtext, with such intellectual and emotional engagement that the Confessions becomes a "text of pleasure."

    As such, the concept might help us to consider how what we come to know as the other, or the object, is always the result of a process of image-making. It is in this suggestive sense that narcissism interests Caroline Rupprecht in Subject to Delusions. Because "the other," or the object, is constructed, Rupprecht finds in narcissism the possibility of rewriting notions of identity. She then pursues this possibility through modern literary texts in which narcissism acts as a structuring principle—works by the expressionist poet Henriette Hardenberg, the American avant-garde novelist Djuna Barnes, and the surrealist writer Unica Zürn—reading each within the critical framework of the evolution of the idea of narcissism in psychoanalytic theory. All written by women, these works also raise questions of gender and sexuality. Moreover, because each of these authors belonged to or was influenced by a particular literary movement, Rupprecht's analysis advances our understanding of the poetics of these movements and of the movement of modernism itself. Underlying all is a deep engagement with psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Freud, his contemporaries and rivals, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and many other theorists, Rupprecht interrogates preconceived notions of identity and subjectivity through her readings of the "transgressive potential" of narcissism as it is enacted in the texts under study. Bringing the works of literary modernism and psychoanalysis together in an innovative and provocative way, her book succeeds in enhancing our sense of both, and in clarifying the complex role of narcissism in our cultural narrative.