Serano shares her experiences and observations—both pre- and post-transition—to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.Serano's well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this “feminine” weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire.In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms.

    The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.

    Am I normal? (and what is "normal," anyway?) What's up down there? I really like girls, but I like boys sometimes, too. Am I gay, bisexual, or just messed up? Are we both really ready to have sex? Is it ok if I masturbate? I feel like I can't ever say no to my partner. What's the problem? Heather Corinna and Scarleteen.com have been providing sex education and information for young adults, parents, and mentors for nearly ten years. Whether you're straight, gay, sexually active, or just plain curious, S.E.X. spells out everything you need to know, including: A sexual readiness checklist Illustrations of female and male reproductive anatomy How to love your body, even when it's changing every day Tips on safer sex for body, heart, and mind An in-depth birth control breakdown How to create and enjoy the relationships that are right for you Popular mechanics of partnered sex: sexual activities explained, including pregnancy and STI risks STIs 101: what they are and how to keep yourself from getting them

    Anthony, Simone de Beauvoir, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hélène Cixous, Betty Friedan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Guerrilla Girls, Ding Ling, Audre Lorde, John Stuart Mill, Christine de Pizan, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Sanger, Huda Shaarawi, Sojourner Truth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf.The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers. Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.

    Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

    Stark traces this failure to a startling paradox, that the singular focus on violence against women masks an even more devastating reality. In millions of abusive relationships, men use a largely unidentified form of subjugation that more closely resembles kidnapping or indentured servitude than assault. He calls this pattern coercive control. Drawing on sources that range from FBI statistics and film to dozens of actual cases from his thirty years of experience as an award-winning researcher, advocate, and forensic expert, Stark shows in terrifying detail how men can use coercive control to extend their dominance over time and through social space in ways that subvert women's autonomy, isolate them, and infiltrate the most intimate corners of their lives. Against this backdrop, Stark analyzes the cases of three women tried for crimes committed in the context of abuse, showing that their reactions are only intelligible when they are reframed as victims of coercive control rather than as battered wives.The story of physical and sexual violence against women has been told often. But this is the first book to show that most abused women who seek help do so because their rights and liberties have been jeopardized, not because they have been injured. The coercive control model Stark develops resolves three of the most perplexing challenges posed by abuse: why these relationships endure, why abused women develop a profile of problems seen among no other group of assault victims, and why the legal system has failed to win them justice.Elevating coercive control from a second-class misdemeanor to a human rights violation, Stark explains why law, policy, and advocacy must shift its focus to emphasize how coercive control jeopardizes women's freedom in everyday life.Fiercely argued and eminently readable, Stark's work is certain to breathe new life into the domestic violence revolution.

    This demanding oral poetry of the early 21st century has defined a vanguard of lithely muscled voices, women who think and act decisively to create their distinctive and desperately earned realities. The combination of the eminent slam movement and the upsurge of bold underground feminism has created a unique pool of women who verbally challenge society on all fronts. Editor Alix Olson (internationally touring spoken word artist-activist) brought together a variety of astounding spoken word artists for Word Warriors.Included in this collection are Patricia Smith and Eileen Myles, two of our most formidable spoken-word foremothers, Tony-award winners Sarah Jones, Suheir Hammad and Staceyann Chin, recording artists Bitch and Lynn Breedlove from the dyke-punk band Tribe 8, award-winning writer Michelle Tea, and many more. These women join other amazing artists from many different backgrounds to create Word Warriors, a powerful and comprehensive collection of work from the best and brightest female spoken word artists today.

    Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.

    Embracing contradiction and repetition, this work maps itself around embodied experiences of disability, race, gender transgression and transition, family violence, and sexuality.

    In addressing a wide range of women’s choices—from using birth control to taking the morning-after pill, from adopting a child to putting a child up for adoption, from having an abortion to bringing a pregnancy to full term—Choice explores the complexities inherent in every reproductive decision.Including twenty-four honest, heartrending essays from established writers such as Francine Prose, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Pam Houston, Ann Hood, and Sarah Messer and emerging talents such as Kimi Faxon Hemingway, Stephanie Anderson, and Ashley Talley, Choice will allow you to truly understand the meaning of the word “choice”—regardless of what side of the debate you stand on.

    Yet there is also an articulate, theoretically informed and activist constituency that identifies as feminist.This book is by and about Indigenous feminists, whose work demonstrates a powerful and original intellectual and political contribution demonstrating that feminism has much to offer Indigenous women in their struggles against oppression and for equality. Indigenous feminism is international in its scope: the contributors here are from Canada, the USA, Sapmi (Samiland), and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The chapters include theoretical contributions, stories of political activism, and deeply personal accounts of developing political consciousness as Aboriginal feminists.

    While other developed countries face similar challenges from globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population.Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the US-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells.America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series

    The Holy Father demonstrates that it is agape, the self-sacrificial love of God that empowers romantic love, eros, with life-giving and meaningful existence. In The Love That Satisfies, Christopher West draws from the Pope s letter a series of insightful and inspiring reflections on the nature of eros, agape, and the relationship between the two. He shows that it is through recognizing and embracing the beauty of God s self-sacrificial love that a person is able to truly be satisfied. In uniting the love of God to the love of spouse, the nuptial bond is fulfilled. Perhaps even more profound is the reality that God and the Bridegroom of the Church has a personal love for his Bride that may certainly be called eros (Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, n. 9).

    Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radical analysis. Frequently, says Agustín, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry. Although they are treated as a marginalised group, they form part of the dynamic global economy.Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice.-from the back cover

    She offers compassionate and helpful direction to women who want to pursue their health and healing in the context of Christian faith, without needing to "be perfect." She touches on issues of relationships, career, motherhood, self esteem, intimacy, abuse, sexuality and others.

    In Love Without Hurt, psychotherapist Dr. Steven Stosny explains the many forms of verbally and emotionally abusive relationships so you can identify abuse and why it’s so important to take action to change your relationship-especially because, if you have children, they have become innocent victims of the same abuse. Drawing from the revolutionary techniques of his CompassionPower “boot camp,” this practical program shows you self-healing techniques to help you recover from the pain and abuse, as well as methods for your partner to rewire his anger, resentment, and abusive behavior. Love Without Hurt is an essential guide for ending the cycle of resentment, pain, and abuse and developing a loving relationship.

    Kiernan surprised her readers with, Frog Toes and Tentacles, a small-form hardcover of ?darkly weird erotica.? Now Kiernan follows that sold-out volume with a second collection of her unique brand of erotica, Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Like its predecessor, this book will be illustrated by acclaimed artist Vince Locke (The Sandman, Batman, A History of Violence, Deadworld, etc.), and also like the first volume, it is unlikely ever to be reprinted.

    Poetry.

    (Kanchamma, a midwife from Alligundam village in Tamil Nadu). We knew the doctor at the scan centre and...went to the clinic that he suggested and had the foetus removed. The next two times were also okay except that I got very tired and had to give up my job. My husband said having a son was more important than having a job. (Renu, from Chandigarh, who has had four abortions in five years). India has historically had a deficit of women compared to most other countries, but we now live in a time when a systematic extermination of an entire gender is taking place right before our eyes. Until the 1980s, women and girls were dying either of neglect or were killed soon after they were born. Today, the horrifying reality is that, thanks to advances in medical technology, they are now eliminated while still in the womb. Female foeticide has become an organized crime and the ultrasound machine has mutated into an instrument of murder. In Disappearing Daughters, Gita Aravamudan uses the tools of investigative reporting to expose the imperatives that drive this horrific phenomenon. She unravels an appalling story of deeply embedded and destructive patriarchal beliefs, disempowered women who have no claim on their own bodies and the active complicity of a ruthless and callous medical and social system. This book makes it chillingly clear that the macabre practice of eliminating female foetuses spells doom for our sons as well as our daughters and is bound to have a disastrous impact on future generations.

    Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the cinematic”—not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier’s roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou.

    Through poetry, art, and essays, this zine tells our stories—funny, sexy, and complex—as a radical act of resistance, and prioritizes the work of trans people and people of color working for radical social change.Featuring artwork, poetry, and essays by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Sarain Cuthand, Louis Esmé Cruz, Sharon Deevey, Loree Erickson, romham padraig gallacher, Raven Gildea, emi k, Dani Frances Montgomery, Peggy Munson , billie rain, Tsi-ge'-yu Sharp, Captain Snowden, suki valentine, and Sharon Wachsler.

    Connelly presents the fullest and most vivid picture yet of how priestesses lived and worked, from the most famous and sacred of them--the Delphic Oracle and the priestess of Athena Polias--to basket bearers and handmaidens. Along the way, she challenges long-held beliefs to show that priestesses played far more significant public roles in ancient Greece than previously acknowledged.Connelly builds this history through a pioneering examination of archaeological evidence in the broader context of literary sources, inscriptions, sculpture, and vase painting. Ranging from southern Italy to Asia Minor, and from the late Bronze Age to the fifth century A.D., she brings the priestesses to life--their social origins, how they progressed through many sacred roles on the path to priesthood, and even how they dressed. She sheds light on the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, and how they were honored, including in death. Connelly shows that understanding the complexity of priestesses' lives requires us to look past the simple lines we draw today between public and private, sacred and secular.The remarkable picture that emerges reveals that women in religious office were not as secluded and marginalized as we have thought--that religious office was one arena in ancient Greece where women enjoyed privileges and authority comparable to that of men. Connelly concludes by examining women's roles in early Christianity, taking on the larger issue of the exclusion of women from the Christian priesthood. This paperback edition includes additional maps and a glossary for student use.

    Intersex, too, is gorgeously written."—Women's Review of Books"It's utterly impossible to not be spellbound by performer-activist Thea Hillman, in person or in print ... A must-read."—Curve“There’s nothing else in print like this amazing and courageous book.”—Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism“An important and wonderfully disarming book. Poetic, political, and deeply personal.”—Beth Lisick, author of Helping Me Help MyselfIntersex (For Lack of a Better Word) chronicles one person’s search for self in a world obsessed with normal. What is “intersex”? According to the Intersex Society of North America, the word describes someone born with sex chromosomes, genitalia, or an internal reproductive system that are neither clearly male nor clearly female. In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Thea Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community. Whether she’s pondering quirky family tendencies (“Drag”), reflecting on “queerness” (“Another”), or recounting scintillating adventures in San Francisco’s sex clubs, Hillman’s brave and fierce vision for cultural and societal change shines through.According to a special report by the Traditional Values Coalition entitled “Homosexual Urban Myth,” award-winning writer Thea Hillman is a radical who conducts erotic readings to promote the “homosexual revolution.” Thea offers presentations about sex and gender and performs her work at colleges and festivals around the country. She lives in Oakland, California.

    Asian American Studies. Translated from the Korean by Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi and Johannes Goransson. "Kim Yi-Deum's poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and the landscape soars inside the confession. These two elements of her poetry are interconnected in the way eros gets pulled up to the divine place. Her poetry appears as poetry, it also appears as prose. As poetry, it's polyphonic, and as prose, it's defiant. Her poetry is the theater of multiple personality. You hear the voices of hundreds of people, hundreds of things. These naked living things become her poetic subjects. In each poem, the different sensations of each body are invented. She punishes herself and accepts her own unsightly, gutless face. Her poetry is engaged in the difficult process of discovering the other inside her. Her rhythm, which emerges from the fishnet of interconnections, bites power and sets her free." Kim Hyesoon"

    In this wide-ranging and thoroughly readable book, Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University and author of a number of leading texts in the field of language and gender studies, draws on over 30 years of scientific research to explain what we really know and to demonstrate how this is often very different from the accounts we are familiar with from recent popular writing. Ambitious in scope and exceptionally accessible, The Myth of Mars and Venus tells it like it is: widely accepted attitudes from the past and from other cultures are at heart related to assumptions about language and the place of men and women in society; and there is as much similarity and variation within each gender as between men and women, often associated with social roles and relationships. The author goes on to consider the influence of Darwinian theories of natural selection and the notion that girls and boys are socialized during childhood into different ways of using language, before addressing problems of miscommunication surrounding, for example, sex and consent to sex, and women's relative lack of success in work and politics. Arguing that what linguistic differences there are between men and women are driven by the need to construct and project personal meaning and identity, Cameron concludes that we have an urgent need to think about gender in more complex ways than the prevailing myths and stereotypes allow.

    Traditionally, femininity has been a role women play, a role defined by culture and simplistic sermons. The author encourages women to look at the feminine roles or boxes that pinch their souls: mother, fashion devotee, working wife, intellectual. Does God treat femininity as a role, a curse, or a gift? And when Jesus redeemed women, what was it exactly that he redeemed?Even after Eden, Fincher points out, God planned to redeem both men and women. But for centuries, women have been taught to devalue the very aspects of their souls that are unique and irreplaceable. Femininity itself runs deeper than aprons, frills, or romance. It begins with feminine souls who are living cameos of the triune God.In Ruby Slippers, Fincher takes a fresh, direct look at the challenges she faced on her search for the feminine soul. She goes step by step through what it means to be a woman and how to cultivate her soul, choosing not to shy away from psychology, theology or personal transparency. In her journey she discovers an understanding of femininity that is timeless and groundbreaking. The roles melt away into something like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, something women have always had—the souls to walk today with freedom and femininity.

    The collection includes a variety of women's illness narratives-poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies-as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women's lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine.The authors of these narratives are diverse in age, ethnicity, family situation, sexual orientation, and economic status. They are doctors, patients, spouses, mothers, daughters, activists, writers, educators, and performers. The narratives serve to acknowledge that women's illness experiences are more than their diseases, that they encompass their entire lives. The pages of this book echo with personal accounts of illness, diagnosis, and treatment. They reflect the social constructions of women's bodies, their experiences of sexuality and reproduction, and their roles as professional and family caregivers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Stories of Illness and Healing draws the connection between women's suffering and advocacy for women's lives.

    Colonialism did not impose precolonial, european gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. But we cannot understand this gender system without understanding what anibal Quijano calls “the coloni- ality of power” (2000a, 2000b, 2001–2002). The reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism—with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power—is to understand our present organization of life anew." — Maria Lugones

    Greg Thomas interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. By connecting sex and eroticism to geopolitics both politically and epistemologically, he examines the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West. The book focuses on the centrality of race, class, and empire to Western realities of "gender and sexuality" and to problematic Western attempts to theorize gender and sexuality (or embodiment). Addressing a wide range of intellectual disciplines, it holds out the hope for an analysis freed from the domination of white, Western terms of reference.

    She, a white American anthropologist, joins forces with an African-Brazilian shantytown activist to change the violence and despair they see around them. Their pledge to the residents to create a top-quality educational center for girls becomes a turbulent journey that takes us from the shantytowns of Northeastern Brazil to urban Seattle to high-society London. With the author, we experience a world of drug dealers, street urchins, and capoeiristas, English socialites, power-hungry "do-gooders," and wise teachers. This is a true story of insight and inspiration, courage, passion, and intrigue.

    Topics include sexuality in Eden, the elevation vs. the denigration of women, exclusivity vs. adultery and pre-marital sex, permanence vs. divorce and remarriage, intimacy vs. incest, and sexuality in the Song of Songs.

    These rituals typically involve the visualization of a deity, offerings, and the chanting of his or her mantra. Common variations include visualizing the deity in the act of sexual union with aconsort, visualizing oneself as the deity, and transgressive acts such as token consumption of meat or alcohol. Most notoriously, non-standard or ritualized sex is sometimes practiced. This accounts for Tantra's negative reputation in some quarters and its reception in the West primarily as acollection of sexual practices. Although some today extol Tantra's liberating qualities, the role of women remains controversial. Traditionally there are two views of women and Tantra. Either the feminine is a metaphor and actual women are altogether absent, or Tantra involves the transgressive use of women's bodies to serve maleinterests. Loriliai Biernacki presents an alternative view, in which women are revered, worshipped, and considered worthy of spiritual attainment. Her primary sources are a collection of eight relatively modern Tantric texts written in Sanskrit from the 15th through the 18th century. Her analysisof these texts reveals a view of women that is generally positive and empowering. She focuses on four topics: 1) the Kali Practice, in which women appear not only as objects of reverence but as practitioners and gurus; 2) the Tantric sex rite, especially in the case that, contrary to other Tantrictexts, the preference is for wives as ritual consorts; 3) feminine language and the gendered implications of mantra; and 4) images of male violence towards women in tantric myths. Biernacki, by choosing to analyse eight particular Sanskrit texts, argues that within the tradition of Tantra thereexists a representation of women in which the female is an authoritative, powerful, equal participant in the Tantric ritual practice.

    Yet, following the 1979 revolution, indigenous Iranian feminists became more vocal in their resistance to this characterization.In Rethinking Global Sisterhood, Nima Naghibi makes powerful connections among feminism, imperialism, and the discourses of global sisterhood. Naghibi investigates topics including the state-sponsored Women’s Organization of Iran and the involvement of feminists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the Iranian feminism movement before and during the 1979 revolution. With a potent analysis of cinema, she examines the veiled woman in the films of Tahmineh Milani, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Kim Longinotto, and Mahnaz Afzali.At a time when Western relations with the Muslim world are in crisis, Rethinking Global Sisterhood provides much-needed insights and explores the limitations and possibilities of cross-cultural feminist social and political interventions.Nima Naghibi is assistant professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.

    Gilded Age elites defined white civilization as the triumphant achievement of exceptional people hewing to a relational ethic of strict self-discipline for the common good. During the early twentieth century, that racial and relational ideal was reconceived in more inclusive terms as “normality,” something toward which everyone should strive. The appearance of inclusiveness helped make “normality” appear consistent with the self-image of a racially diverse republic; nonetheless, “normality” was gauged largely in terms of adherence to erotic and emotional conventions that gained cultural significance through their association with arguments for the legitimacy of white political and social dominance. At the same time, the affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality of “normal” married couples became increasingly central to legitimate membership in the nation.Carter builds his intricate argument from detailed readings of an array of popular texts, focusing on how sex education for children and marital advice for adults provided significant venues for the dissemination of the new ideal of normality. He concludes that because its overt concerns were love, marriage, and babies, normality discourse facilitated white evasiveness about racial inequality. The ostensible focus of “normality” on matters of sexuality provided a superficially race-neutral conceptual structure that whites could and did use to evade engagement with the unequal relations of power that continue to shape American life today.

    Gradually, as we uncover the truth about what our ancestors believed and peel back the veneer of colonization, it is clear that the sexuality of indigenous peoples is vastly different from the dominant Western paradigm that has been applied around the world.The stories in this book testify to the great diversity of Maori and indigenous sexuality today and provide inspiration for people who want to know more about sexuality and its role in our lives. The people in this book have overcome huge challenges related to their sexuality.These stories will inspire and encourage you, and parts of them will sadden you. The truth that shines through in these stories, though, will confirm that sexuality continues to play a key role in the lives of indigenous people in the twenty-first century. As we decide for ourselves what sexuality means to us, we take control and determine the future for generations to come.

    They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am--and this ought to made very clear--I am a very serious woman." For more than fifty years, Bella Abzug championed the powerless and disenfranchised, as an activist, congresswoman, and leader in every major social initiative of her time--from Zionism and labor in the 40s to the ban-the-bomb efforts in the 50s, to civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements of the 60s, to the women's movement in the 70s and 80s, to enviromnemtal awareness and economic equality in the 90s. Her political idealism never waning, Abzug gave her final public speech before the U.N. in March 1998, just a few weeks before her death. Presented in the voices of both friends and foes, of those who knew, fought with, revered, and struggled alongside her, this oral biography will be the first comprehensive account of a woman who was one of our most influential leaders. Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom are both nationally recognized authorities on women's issues. Most recently, Levine is the author of "Inventing the Rest of Lives" and Thom is the author of "Inside Ms." Bella Azbug said, "I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am--and this ought to made very clear--I am a very serious woman." For more than fifty years, Bella Abzug championed the powerless and disenfranchised, as an activist, congresswoman, and leader in every major social initiative of her time--from Zionism and labor in the 40s to the ban-the-bomb efforts in the 50s, to civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements of the 60s, to the women's movement in the 70s and 80s, to environmental awareness and economic equality in the 90s. Her political idealism never waning, Abzug gave her final public speech before the U.N. in March 1998, just a few weeks before her death. Presented in the voices of both friends and foes, of those who knew, fought with, revered, and struggled alongside her, this oral biography will be the first comprehensive account of a woman who was one of our most influential leaders. "Abzug was certainly a major player in our change in attitudes in the second part of the past century [and] Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom give us a fascinating glimpse into [an] inspirational but undeniably peculiar period that is receding, all too quickly, into the past."--Carolyn See, "The Washington Post " "A fabulous read about a breed of politician now largely extinct . . . Levine and Thom have crafted a history that brings to life one of the great political personalities of the twentieth century."--Alice Echols, "Bookforum " "Abzug was certainly a major player in our change in attitudes in the second part of the past century [and] Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom give us a fascinating glimpse into [an] inspirational but undeniably peculiar period that is receding, all too quickly, into the past."--Carolyn See, "The Washington Post " "[A] fluid, sharply edited book . . . Abzug was a force of nature, and the stories about her are consistently feisty."--Jon Dolan, "Time Out New York" "During this 'historic' election year, let me just say what so many of us are thinking: I miss Bella Abzug. And Barbara Jordan. What I would give to see Bella toss one of her signature striped, oversized hats into the presidential ring. Or to hear Barbara Jordan debate an comer, to hear her intone the preamble of the constitution as she reminds us of the true meanings of 'equality' and 'justice.' If only big, bold Bella or big, bold Barbara were here to run . . . and win. So far my only solace has been the recently published oral history of Bella . . . The book is edited by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, women with long histories of activism and scholarship in and about the women's movement in America."--Susan Davis, "The News & Observer" (Raleigh) "This is like being a fly on the wall for some of the most important moments in political history over the past fifty years. Being a part of this conversation makes you not just appreciate Bella's fierceness, but want to emulate it."--Amy Richards, co-author of "Manifesta" and former colleague of Bella "Bella was a radical, patriotic and passionate about transforming the system--with the courage to work from outside and the patience to work from inside. Like her life, this book radiates drama, humor, tactical brilliance--and heart. Bella mattered. So does this book."--Jane Fonda "Stumped about what to do in this messed up world? Just get to know Bella Abzug, one of the most important activists of the twentieth century. By gathering the reminiscences of people who lived their personal and political lives right along with her--and sometimes had the courage to break the rules alongside her too--the authors have created a memoir in many voices that captures the suspense, humor, and contradictions of this great woman. Read this book and then ask yourself, "What would Bella do?""--Gloria Steinem "Bella Abzug didn't vet her opinions through consultants and polls. She wasn't a highly orchestrated pre-fab candidate sprung from a well-oiled multi-million dollar corporate machine. She was the real deal. Pro-peace, pro-worker, pro-women. Angry, authentic, grassroots, alienating and alive. And, she actually got elected. This book is a call to all of us, but particularly those in government to run and lead through their own moral steam rather than blowing more hot air."--Eve Ensler ""Bella Abzug" is an important, inspiring piece of history. There's nothing we need more right now than this kind of cogent reminder of what it takes to make change in the halls of power--and what's at stake if we don't."--Lisa Jervis, co-founder of "Bitch" magazine

    In the essays, which feature original, lively and accessible prose, anti-sexist men make sense of their gendered experiences in today's culture.The authors tackle the issues of feminism, growing up male, recognizing masculine privilege, taking action to change the imbalance of power and privilege and the constraints that men experience in confronting sexism. They describe their successes and challenges in bucking patriarchal systems in a culture that can be unsupportive of - or downright hostile to - a pro-feminist perspective.In these chapters, a diverse group of men reflect on growing up, share moments in their day-to-day lives, and pose serious questions about being a pro-feminist male living, working, thinking, and learning in a sexist society.

    Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema.

    But we have been conditioned, writes Beth Felker Jones, to think of salvation as being about anything but the body. We think that what God wants for us has to do with our thoughts, our hearts, or our interior relationships. In popular piety and academic theology alike, strong spiritualizing tendencies influence our perception of the body. Historically, some theologians have denigrated the body as an obstacle to sanctification. This notion is deeply problematic for feminist ethics, which centers on embodiment. Jones's purpose is to devise a theology of the body that is compatible with feminist politics. Human creatures must be understood as psychosomatic unities, she says, on analogy with the union of Christ's human and divine natures. She offers close readings of Augustine and Calvin to find a better way of speaking about body and soul that is consonant with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She addresses several important questions: What does human psychosomatic unity imply for the theological conceptualization of embodied difference, especially gendered difference? How does embodied hope transform our present bodily practices? How does God's momentous yes to the body, in the Incarnation, both judge and destroy the corrupt ways we have thought, produced, constructed, and even broken bodies in our culture, especially bodies marked by race and gender?Jones's book articulates a theology of human embodiment in light of resurrection doctrine and feminist political concerns. Through reading Augustine and Calvin, she points to resources for understanding the body in a way that coheres with the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. Jones proposes a grammar in which human psychosomatic unity becomes the conceptual basis for sanctification. Using gender as an illustration, she interrogates the difference resurrection doctrine makes for holiness. Because death has been overcome in Christ's resurrected body, human embodiment can bear witness to the Triune God. The bodily resurrection makes sense of our bodies, of what they are and what they are for.

    Neither prurient nor overly sympathetic, she investigates rape from a historical standpoint examining the history of sexual aggression, the idea of rape as a social construct, and the often-ignored idea of embodiment, and analyzes the physical response of rapists as well as the often-cited “rape is about power” theories.Indebted to a growing body of sophisticated feminist analyses about rape victims, Bourke here shifts the emphasis from the victims to the perpetrators in order to place rapists in their historical context. An invaluable study, this book delivers the hard truth that if we are to imagine a world free of unwanted sexual violence, then we must consider the issue of rape from every angle.

    Integrating linguistic and textual approaches into an anthropologically-inspired framework, this book reassesses the full range of evidence. It traces continuities and changes in medieval non-Christian beliefs with a new degree of reliability, from pre-conversion times to the eleventh century and beyond, and uses comparative material from medieval Ireland and Scandinavia to argue for a dynamic relationship between beliefs and society. In particular, it interprets the cultural significance of elves as a cause of illness in medical texts, and provides new insights into the much-discussed Scandinavian magic of seidr. Elf-beliefs, moreover, were connected with Anglo-Saxon constructions of sex and gender; their changing nature provides a rare insight into a fascinating area of early medieval European culture. Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2007 ALARIC HALL is a fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

    The author, a certified biblical counselor, teaches and speaks on practical applications of biblical principles in honest yet bold, new ways. As one pastor-reviewer wrote, "This is not just another marriage book. I see this struggle so often in marriages - but I've never had a great resource to put into the woman's hand. This is NOT a basic marriage book. This is also not a book that is pushing the old 'shut up and submit and just serve your husband concept. You're going to want to get this book...read it...and get copies to give away to others." Readers write: "It feels like you've been in my living room, watching our marriage!" "Wow--liberating!" "I thought at one point it was actually my own diary!" ("The God Empowered Wife" is also available in Spanish as, "La Esposa en el Poder de Dios")

    These women may lack material resources, but they possess a wealth of an even more precious resource: imagination—their imaginations light the dark. Women in Morocco create and produce plays that educate illiterate people about women’s rights. Girls in Zimbabwe compose and perform poetry that shocks communities into fighting child rape. In Viet Nam, counselors heal survivors of domestic violence with line dancing, art and games. Teachers in India invent puppet shows that help homeless children understand AIDS. Brazilian math teachers inspire girls from the favelas to learn arithmetic by originating fashion shows. Roma women in Slovakia collaborate with non-Roma women to design postcards, kindling communication in place of suspicion. Lesbians in Argentina develop and stage street skits, demonstrating against discrimination. A master ballet teacher instructs a thousand poor Cuban children in classical dance. Sometimes imagination takes the form of innovative strategies. In Nepal, women teach their sisters to drive taxis and guide treks, and in Nicaragua, to become welders, carpenters and electricians—all, supposedly, men’s jobs. In Kenya, mothers get wells dug so their daughters can go to school instead of walking seven hours to fetch water. In Cambodia, doctors and nurses conduct mobile clinics and arrange loans to give indigent women the health and funds to start businesses, foiling sex traffickers who try to lure women with promises of income. In Cameroun, medical specialists train traditional rulers and healers whose behavior has inadvertently spread AIDS, to become health educators. Recreational activists in the United States introduce women with disabilities to challenge courses, camping, whitewater rafting and swimming, empowering them to lead others who are disabled. Travel with photojournalist Paola Gianturco: climb Annapurna; eat lunch while soldiers carry sandbags to the roof; watch a traditional healer at work; attend a Muslim reception with ambassadors, rabbis, bishops and cabinet ministers; witness a ceremony that welcomes indigenous babies to the world. Listen as 129 women in 15 countries on five continents describe their lives, dreams and work. They will inspire you with their courage, creativity and effectiveness as they kindle hope and possibilities for their families, communities, countries and our world.

    Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist’s point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It’s time to give Mozart’s women—and Mozart’s multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character—their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart’s four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations.Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero’s narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart’s women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts—past and current—influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

    The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and related topics has developed since the 1960s. The book also explains how feminist philosophy relates to the many forms of feminist politics. The book provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. The book also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, womens studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader.

    In this issue: Rackham searches for a missing shovel and ends up arguing with Chess about the finer points of the 'manly arts'; Flora the Goat is fed up with being penned up; and Tolly finishes opening the secret passageway... with disastrous results!

    The Tzotzil women of the Chiapas Highlands are the poets and the artists. Ambar Past, who collected the poems and drawings, includes a moving essay about their poetics, beliefs, and history.In the 1970s, living among the Maya, Past watched the people endure as an epidemic swept through a village. No help came. Many children died. One mother offered her dead child a last sip of Coca-Cola and uttered a prayer:Take this sweet dew from the earth, take this honey. It will help you on your way. It will give you strength on your path.Incantations like this—poems about birth, love, hate, sex, despair, and death—coupled with primitive illustrations, provide a compelling insight into the psychology of these Mayan women poets. The Cinco Puntos edition of Incantations is a facsimile of the original handmade edition produced by the Taller Leñateros. It was reviewed in The New York Times.At the age of twenty-three, Ambar Past left the United States for Mexico. She lived among the Mayan people, teaching the techniques of native dyes and learning to speak Tzotzil. She is the creator of the graphic arts collective Taller Leñateros in Chiapas and was a founding member of Sna Jolobil, a weaving cooperative for Mayan artisans.

     L. H. Stallings offers distinct close readings of understudied African American women’s texts through a critical engagement with folklore and queer theory. To date, most studies on the trickster figure have rarely reflected the boldness and daring of the figure itself. Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis. Mutha’ is Half a Word strives to break that convention. This book provides a much-needed analysis of trickster tradition in regard to gender, sexuality, and Black female sexual desire. It is the only study to focus specifically on trickster figures and African American female culture. In addition, it contributes to conversations regarding the cultural representation of Black female desire in ways that are not strategically invested in heteronormative binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. The study is distinctly different because it explores folklore, vernacular, and trickster strategies of queerness alongside theories of queer studies to create new readings of desire in literary texts, hip-hop and neo-soul music, and comedic performances by Black females.

    This is an introduction to the women's health movements and what is being accomplished by women organizing to achieve better health care around the world.

    Reviewing the sources available, it discusses the historical contexts which have nurtured patriarchal societies. Finally it applies these ideas to Indian history and sociology and examines how caste has interacted synergistically with patriarchy in India. A useful text for students as well as for the general reader.‘Today, the term 'patriarchy' is used somewhat differently. It is not only a descriptive term that explains how specific societies construct male authority and power, but also an analytical category. The transformation of patriarchy from a descriptive to an analytical category happened in a specific global historical context, the 1970s, that gave birth to a rousing feminist intellectual culture.’ This book forms a part of Theorizing Feminism Series edited by Maithreyi Krishnaraj.

    The book illuminates a wide range of contemporary issues in popular culture, children's sports, and women's and men's college and professional sports. Each chapter is preceded by a short introduction that lays out the context in which the piece was written. Drawing on his own memories as a former athlete, informal observations of his children's sports activities, and more formal research such as life-history interviews with athletes and content analyses of sports media, Michael A. Messner presents a multifaceted picture of gender constructed through an array of personalities, institutions, cultural symbols, and everyday interactions.

    Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women's artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation.Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud's private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger's concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova 's Three Graces and women artist's modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath.Artists featured include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.

    For decades, stories by Yiddish women writers were available only to those who spoke the “mother tongue” of Eastern European Jews. This translation brings some of the “lost” women writers of the golden age of Yiddish to English-speaking readers.Their stories range from the wryly humorous—a girl seeking a wet nurse for her cousin brings him to a shiksa, with dire consequences—to the bittersweet, as a once-idealistic revolutionary now sees her hopes for humanity as “fantasy.” The title is from a poem that describes a widow arguing with a storm that threatens her harvest. It is a metaphor for the Holocaust, whose dark cloud was rising. Arguing with the Storm is a joy to read and a tribute to all those women, who, in arguing with the storm, fought to protect their families and way of life.The anthology includes works by Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, Bryna Bercovitch, Anne Viderman, Malka Lee, Frume Halpern, Rochel Bruches, Paula Frankel-Zaltzman, Chava Rosenfarb, and Rikuda Potash.Rhea Tregebov teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently (alive): Poems New and Selected. She collected these tales with the help of the Winnipeg Women’s Yiddish Reading Circle.

    This riveting work of history examines this well-publicized crime and the highly sensationalized trial of the killer. In a fascinating investigation of the media, political, and judicial records surrounding this cause célèbre, Eugenia Lean shows how Shi Jianqiao planned not only to avenge the death of her father, but also to attract media attention and galvanize public support. Lean traces the rise of a new sentiment—"public sympathy"—in early twentieth-century China, a sentiment that ultimately served to exonerate the assassin. The book sheds new light on the political significance of emotions, the powerful influence of sensational media, modern law in China, and the gendered nature of modernity.

    Her evocative works probe questions of race, class, cultural hybridism, and national identities in African diasporic communities. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water is the first full-scale survey of the artist’s career. The title, borrowed from one of her works, evokes at once the dangerous sea crossings faced by her enslaved ancestors from Africa and her Cuban contemporaries seeking greater freedom in America, and the sense of dislocation felt when physical and geopolitical barriers divide family and friends, past and future. Lisa D. Freiman considers how Campos-Pons’s practice, which is predicated on concepts of separation, memory, and fragmentation, developed and transformed from her artistic training and early production in Cuba in the 1980s through her move to the United States in 1991 and her subsequent recognition as a major figure in the international art world. Okwui Enwezor interprets Campos-Pons’s expressive materials--reassembled fragments of lost traditions and symbols, and memories of personal and collective history, religion, and mythology--within the context of post-colonial theory. Handsomely designed and produced, this book offers an unprecedented opportunity to assess the significance and import of this challenging artist’s work.

    Resisting both the rejection of theory and the current displacement of art history in favour of visual culture, New Encounters instead rejuvenate both approaches. Marked out by its critical engagement with and close informed readings of images, texts and cultural events, this series employs new feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives. New Encounters also showcases exciting new volumes which revisit key figures in twentieth century art through highly original feminist approaches. The notion of a special intimacy between "the feminine and the sacred" has received significant attention since the publication of Julia Kristeva and Cathérine Clément's famous ecumenical "conversation" of the same name which focused on the relationship between meaning and the body at whose interface the feminine is positioned. Brought to the wider public as the "sacred feminine", it has also made its mark on popular culture. Taking up the debate and moving beyond anthropology or theology, writers from varied ethnic, geo-cultural and religious perspectives here join with secular cultural analysts to explore the sacred and the feminine in art, architecture, literature, art history, music, philosophy, theology, critical theory and cultural studies. The book addresses key issues in feminist questions of creativity, the imaginary and the sacred as "otherness", exploring the ways in which visual practices have explored this rich, contested and highly charged territory.

    In this remarkable investigation into contemporary ideas of gender, sociologists Crawley, Foley, and Shehan argue that bodies are constantly being gendered, or encouraged to participate in (heterosexual) gender conformity. This engendering influences nutrition practices, work and employment choices, dieting, working out, cosmetic surgery, sexual practices, and training-or lack thereof-in sports or fitness. This is an accessible, yet comprehensive, sociological inquiry into a theory of the gendered body.

    Employing philosophical analysis, reference to empirical research, and relevant personal experience, Luke develops a new theory of how exploitative institutions do not work to promote human flourishing but instead merely act as support for a particular construction of manhood. The resulting work is of significant interest both to animal advocates and opponents of sexism.

    Sanjam Ahluwalia draws attention to the history of Indian birth control by including western activists such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes alongside important Indian campaigners. In revealing the elitist politics of middle-class feminists, Indian nationalists, Western activists, colonial authorities, and the medical establishment, Ahluwalia finds that they all sought to rationalize procreation and regulate women while invoking competing notions of freedom, femininity, and family. _x000B__x000B_Ahluwalia's remarkable interviews with practicing midwives in rural northern India fills a gaping void in the documentary history of birth control and shows that the movement has had little appeal to nonelite groups in India. She argues that elitist birth control efforts failed to account for Indian women's values and needs and have worked to restrict reproductive rights rather than liberate subaltern Indian women since colonial times. _x000B__x000B_

    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

    A world where clothes get folded just so, delicious dinners await, and flatulence is just not that funny. Give the fairer sex what they really wantbeautiful PG photos of hunky men cooking, listening, asking for directions, accompanied by steamy captions: "I love a clean house!" or "As long as I have two legs to walk on, you'll never take out the trash." Now this is porn that will leave women begging for more!

    It analyses several aspects of women's nationalist activism: collaboration and direct activism in ETA, cultural movements, motherhood, prison and feminism. By focusing on gender politics Women and ETA offers new perspectives on the history of ETA, including recruitment, the militarization of radical Basque nationalism, and the role of the media in shaping popular understandings of 'terrorism'. These arguments are directly relevant to the study of women in other insurgence and terrorist movements. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, Hispanic studies, gender studies, anthropology and politics, as well as to journalists and readers interested in women's participation in contemporary conflicts and terrorist movements.

    This title traces this evolution in its social, political, and philosophical contexts, charting the rise of psychology as a legitimate field of scientific pursuit, and of psychiatry as a medical specialty.

    Exploring classics like Wuthering Heights (1939) and Jane Eyre (1944), this book shows how cultural anxieties about women shaped such adaptations in Britain and America during the Depression and after World War II, then going on to approach the more recent wave of adaptations in the 1990s.

    Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo.Avi Lewis is an author and filmmaker. Klein and Lewis co-produced The Take, a film about Argentina’s occupied factories.

    The book looks at military women who engage in torture; the Chechen 'Black Widows'; Middle Eastern suicide bombers; and the women who directed and participated in genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Sjoberg & Gentry analyse the biological, psychological and sexualized stereotypes through which these women are conventionally depicted, arguing that these are rooted in assumptions about what is 'appropriate' female behaviour. What these stereotypes have in common is that they all perceive women as having no agency in any sphere of life, from everyday choices to global political events. This book is a major feminist re-evaluation of women's motivations and actions as perpetrators of political violence.

    It tells the fascinating story of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest membership organization of low-income people in U.S. history. Setting that story in the context of its turbulent times, the 1960s and early 1970s, historian Felicia Kornbluh shows how closely tied that story was to changes in mainstream politics, both nationally and locally in New York City.The Battle for Welfare Rights offers new insight into women's activism, poverty policy, civil rights, urban politics, law, consumerism, social work, and the rise of modern conservatism. It tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.

    The ubiquity of cloth in everyday life, the historically resonant relationship of textile and cloth to labor, and the tumultuous drive of globalization make the issues raised by this pubication of special interest today. The seventeen essays cover topics ranging from art-making practices to labor history and the effects of globalization as seen through art and labor. The artists' projects--twelve striking and beautiful eight-page, full color spreads--conduct parallel investigations into art, cloth, and work.The contributors explore, from historical and personal perspectives, such subjects as the charged history of offshore garment workers; the different systems of production and consumption in factories, homes, studios, and exhibitions; the revelation of class, gender, and sexuality through cloth, costume, and textile images; textile production as commemorative acts in South Africa, the United States, and India; transnationalism, cultural hybridity, and race in the work of individual artists; lost histories of garment production and embroidery; the physical act of art-making as labor; and the value of handmade and technologically improved objects.Artist projects and portfoliosSusie Brandt, Nick Cave, Park Chambers, Lisa Clark, Lia Cook, Ann Hamilton, Kimsooja, Barbara Layne and Sue Rowley, Lara Lepionka, Merrill Mason, Darrel Morris, Pep�n Osorio, J. Morgan Puett and Iain Kerr, Karen Reimer, Yinka Shonibare, SubRosa, Christine Tarkowski, Anne Wilson

    . . Wallace-Sanders reveals . . . disturbing innuendos of mammy still relevant today, in particular the elevation in value of raising others' children at the expense of one's own." ---Choice"In this insightful analysis of representations of mammy, Wallace-Sanders skillfully illustrates how this core icon of Black womanhood has figured prominently in upholding hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the United States. Far from being a timeless, natural, benign image of domesticity, the idealized mammy figure was repeatedly reworked to accommodate varying configurations of racial rule. No one reading this book will be able to see Gone with the Wind in the same way ever again."---Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland"Kimberly Wallace-Sanders' interdisciplinary approach is first-rate. This expansive and engaging book should appeal to students and scholars in American studies, African American studies, and women's studies." ---Thadious Davis, The University of Pennsylvania Her cheerful smile and bright eyes gaze out from the covers of old cookbooks, song sheets, syrup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and cookie jars, and she has long been a prominent figure in fiction, film, television, and folk art. She is Mammy, a figure whose provocative hold on the American psyche has persisted since before the Civil War.But who is Mammy, and where did she come from? Her large, dark body and her round smiling face tower over our imaginations to such an extent that more accurate representations of African American women wither in her shadow. Mammy's stereotypical attributes---a sonorous and soothing voice, raucous laugh, infinite patience, self-deprecating wit, and implicit acceptance of her own inferiority and her devotion to white children---all point to a long-lasting and troubled confluence of racism, sexism, and southern nostalgia.This groundbreaking book traces the mammy figure and what it has symbolized at various historical moments that are linked to phases in America's racial consciousness. The author shows how representations of Mammy have loomed over the American literary and cultural imagination, an influence so pervasive that only a comprehensive and integrated approach of this kind can do it justice.The book's many illustrations trace representations of the mammy figure from the nineteenth century to the present, as she has been depicted in advertising, book illustrations, kitchen figurines, and dolls. The author also surveys the rich and previously unmined history of the responses of African American artists to the black mammy stereotype, including contemporary reframings by artists Betye Saar, Michael Ray Charles, and Joyce Scott.Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is editor of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.

    This edition features a new comprehensive introduction, revised section introductions, and eighteen new selections, including original articles on sex trafficking, masculinity and terrorism, and community responses to gender violence. Other topics represented in this volume include sexual harassment and violence in schools and workplaces, child abuse, intimate partner violence, and pornography.Innovative theoretical and empirical articles written by scholars from fields such as law, history, and the social sciences appear alongside solution-focused pieces developed by activists, academics, and poets committed to creating a non-violent world.

    Timmel Duchamp has assembled a collage of diverse materials to document the thirtieth anniversary of WisCon, which was a grand reunion of most of the convention's previous Guests of Honor. These include the transcript of Samuel R. Delany's interview of Joanna Russ, several essays reflecting on the diverse aspects of the convention, as well as papers presented in the academic track, panel notes and transcripts, an original short story by Rosaleen Love, and Eileen Gunn's snappy series of Q&A with numerous WisCon attendees, among them Ursula K. Le Guin, Julie Phillips, Ted Chiang, Carol Emshwiller, and Suzy McKee Charnas.* Introduction by L. Timmel Duchamp* “The WisCon Questions: A Coven of People Who Attended WisCon 30 Answer Random Personal Questions Posed by * Eileen Gunn” (interspersed throughout)* Q&A--Julie Philips* “Wonder Woman: Lesbian or Dyke? Paradise Island as a Woman’s Community” by Trina Robbins* Q&A—Suzy Charnas* “Welcome Back to the Beginning” by Rachel Swirsky* “Feminist Think Tanks”—panel transcript notes by Liz Henry* “A Think Tank Thing for Feminists” by Rosaleen Love* Q&A: Carol Emshwiller* Q&A Mark Rich* Q&A Ellen Klages* “Lord of the Monsters” by Andrea Hairston* Q&A Ted Chiang* Q&A Ursula K. Le Guin* Q&A Liz Henry* “The Feminist Romance Panel: Notes” by Micole Sudberg* “Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory-Building Activity?”—panel transcript notes by Laura Quilter* Q&A Lisa Tuttle* “Piercy’s Gendered Cyborgs: Hope, Threats, and Blurred Boundaries” by Linda Wight* Q&A Diantha Day Sprouse* “Uncomfortable Politics in Feminist Writing”—panel transcript notes by Laura Quilter* “The Cultural Appropriation Panel: Notes” by Yoon Ha Lee* “Researching WisCon Stories: Revisionist History or Re-visioning the Past with the Future in Mind” by Joan Haran* Q&A K. Tempest Bradford* Q&A Spike Parsons* “Who Wants a Revolution? Will a Reform Do?”—panel transcript notes by Liz Henry* “We Aren’t Civilized Yet: Reflections from the WisCon 30 Panel on Women Warriors” by Nancy Jane Moore* “‘A Man Is Like A Nut’: Gender and Magic in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Later Earthsea Novels” by Sylvia Kelso* The Legendary Joanna Russ Interviewed by Samuel R. Delany* Q&A Jeanne Gomoll* “A 40 Year-old Con-virgin Goes to WisCon” by Stephen Gold* “Sympathy and Power: L. Timmel Duchamp Asks Samuel R. Delany a Question”* “Dry Eyes” by Nisi Shawl* “No Man’s Land,” an original story by Rosaleen Love

    Films not only captured the public imagination, they altered the way the world was represented to and received by the eager viewing audience. This groundbreaking book explores the history of visual media in Britain during this key period, when the nineteenth century was closing and the twentieth just beginning.  Lynda Nead shows in this original study how the period witnessed a transformation from stasis to movement across the entire range of visual media, including painting, photography, and film as well as stage magic, lantern pictures, early film posters, and astronomy. She looks at the effects of this transformation from a wide variety of perspectives, demonstrating how the idea of motion haunted all visual media and altered both viewers’ expectations of the image and their modes of perception. Nead portrays a fascinating cultural landscape in the midst of change, filling in the details with a rich selection of illustrations.

    This book has already been widely accepted and anticipated in the Transgender community and familys dealing with transgender issues. Written in an easy to read style, it addresses many issues faced by transgender individuals, their spouses/mates, and family members. Helps anyone seeking accurate information about what it means and doesn t mean to be transgender. Author Reid Vanderburgh brings a unique point of view to his writing as a licensed therapist and someone who transitioned female-to-male in the mid 1990 s. The book provides a point of reference for therapist with transitioning clients Topics include: Addiction and Transitioning; Workplace disclosure; What support looks like; Learning the rules of a new gender role; What does post Transition look like; Fundamentalist Transitioning

    The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage that boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children's culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular texts as Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Japanese manga and anime often perform rituals of subject formation in overtly grotesque ways that repulse adult readers and attract boys. They often use depictions of the abject - threats to bodily borders - to blur the distinctions between what is outside the body and what is inside, between what is "I" and what is "not I." Because of their reliance on depictions of the abject, those popular texts that most vigorously perform exaggerated versions of masculinity also create opportunities to make dominant masculinity visible as a social construct.

    Andrew Mangham explores the era's problematic criminalisation of female behaviour with reference to medical theories on women's psychology, reports of notorious criminal cases, like Constance Kent's and Madeline Smith's, and the popular fictions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Wilkie Collins.

    This book examines the nature of these identities. Georgia Warnke argues that identities, in general, are interpretations and, as such, have more in common with textual understanding than we commonly acknowledge. A racial, sexed or gendered understanding of who we and others are is neither exhaustive of the 'meanings' we can be said to have nor uniquely correct. We are neither always, or only, black or white, men or women or males or females. Rather, all identities have a restricted scope and can lead to injustices and contradictions when they are employed beyond that scope. In concluding her argument, Warnke considers the legal and policy implications that follow for affirmative action, childbearing leave, the position of gays in the military and marriage between same-sex partners.

    By revisiting more than 50 years of descriptions of her travels, her epic three-volume history of the British Empire, and her startling and thoughtful memoir about her sex change, the volume contains many full, intimate insights into her character from renowned contributors, including George Band, Arturo di Stefano, David Fieldhouse, Don Geroge, David Hurn, Pico Iyer, Robert McCrum, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Patrick Nairn, Jim Perrin, Hilary Rubenstein, Colin Thubron, Erica Wagner, Alan Whicker, Simon Winchester, and Peregrine Wortsthorne.

    E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections between the “Negro question” that defined so much of his intellectual life and the “woman question” that engaged writers and feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that within Du Bois’s work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects race, gender, sexuality, and justice. This provocative collection investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but also to demonstrate his relevance for today’s scholarly and political concerns. Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California; Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College; Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U. Susan Gillman is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

    The Male Dancer has proven to be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural construction of gender.

    1952) and her Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which won the 1992 NCR book award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award, and got officially banned in China. Despite its popular reception and crucial acclaim, Chang's work has invited a lot of attacks. Among the most common is the contention that it merely focuses on the experience of the privileged and does not tell the reader what other memoirs have not already revealed. Chinese Women Writers in Diaspora is a pioneering study that focuses on four Chinese women writers currently living in the United States and England, whose works have been popularly received-and are in many cases, highly controversial-but have received little scholarly attention: Xinran (b. 1958), Hong Ying (b. 1962), Anchee Min (b. 1957), and Adeline Yen Mah (b. 1937). The chapters illuminate how Xinran constructs her identity and her fellow Chinese women in dialectics of self and other; how Hong Ying evokes cycles of return that blend Western and Chinese philosophical concepts; how Min employs images of theatre and theatrical conventions to depict the entrapment and transgression of her protagonists; and how Mah transliterates and appropriates both Western and Chinese fairy tale motifs to fashion her Chinese feminist utopia. While Jung Chang's memoir seems confining, it has aroused interest in the genre of Chinese female autobiography, and Chinese women writers who live and write between cultures.

    TransForming Community investigates these triumphs and conflicts. Inspired by the San Francisco-based performance series of the same name, TransForming Community gives voice to frustration, humor, anger, and joy; to the struggle for understanding and the excitement at the beginning of a whole new queer community by those who are at the heart of it.

    The focus is on linking people across family boundaries to solve common problems, as personal and relational problems are situated in broader social issues so as to form a healing context.

    His father, an American Samoan, was a naturalized United States citizen while his mother was a citizen of independent Samoa. Through the one-parent naturalization law of the U.S. Immigration Office, Vanessa became a United States national, the immigration status of all the citizens of the American Samoa Territory of the United States. His memoirs are a recollection of his life as he struggled through his sexual identity, becoming the first faaafafine to reach a deputy position in a government department (ASCC) dressed as a woman. It also depicts his involvement in the establishment of the first faaafafine organization on the island and its beauty pageant fund-raising to help the community, specifically the old peopleas home at Fatu-o-Aiga and the LBJ Medical Center. He also promulgates his reactions to the writings on faaafafines by different authors in this short autobiography.

    A journey of hope, healing, and restoration.

    Young argues that this assumption not only exaggerates the differences between two compatible varieties of English but forces black males to choose between an education and their masculinity, by choosing to act either white or black. As one would expect from a scholar who is subject to the very circumstances he studies, Young shares his own experiences as he exposes the factors that make black racial identity irreconcilable with literacy for blacks, especially black males