Vulnerable yet tough, she eventually ended up a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. It took time and incredible resilience, but finally, with the help of a local church community, she broke free of her pimp and her past. Three years later, Lloyd arrived in the United States to work with adult women in the sex industry and soon founded her own nonprofit— GEMS, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services—to meet the needs of other girls with her history. She also earned her GED and won full scholarships to college and a graduate program. Today Lloyd is executive director of GEMS in New York City and has turned it into one of the nation's most groundbreaking nonprofit organizations. In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark, secretive world of her past in stunning cinematic detail. And, with great humanity, she lovingly shares the stories of the girls whose lives she has helped—; small victories that have healed her wounds and made her whole. Revelatory, authentic, and brave, Girls Like Us is an unforgettable memoir.

    The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.

    This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same "neutral" legal structures.Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law raises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a "legal rights framework," but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.An attorney, educator, and trans activist, Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice.

    Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen instead explores how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

    We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."—The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change—and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind. Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic. Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide. Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

    The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

    But Junia's tragedy is not hers alone. She's joined by fellow women in the Bible whose stories of bold leadership have been overlooked. She's in the company of visionary women of God throughout the centuries whose names we've forgotten, whose stories go untold, and whose witness we neglect to celebrate.But Junia is also joined by women today--women who are no longer silent and who are experiencing a re-voicing as they respond to God's call to lead us into all truth. (Patheos Press)

    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

    And they raise the question: can women’s access to public space be viewed in isolation from that of other marginal groups?Going beyond the problem of the real and implied risks associated with women’s presence in public, they draw from feminist theory to argue that only by celebrating loitering—a radical act for most Indian women—can a truly equal, global city be created.

    actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

    Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.

    They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies. Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examines the hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice. In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. She places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism

    The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

    Take Me There is an erotica collection unlike any other that celebrates the pleasure, heat, and diversity of transgender and genderqueer sexualities. The power of seeing and being seen is a central theme in the anthology; it’s not simply about passing or not passing (an idea often explored with transgender characters), but about being acknowledged and desired in a sexual context.The book takes you from San Francisco to Israel, from heartache to lust, from stranger sex to a 10 year anniversary, from ballet shoes to butt plug bondage tables, from fumbling teenagers to leatherclad bears, from MTF and FTM—and in between and beyond.Featuring renowned authors Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation), Patrick Califia (Speaking Sex to Power), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Ivan Coyote (Missed Her), Julia Serrano (Whipping Girl), Laura Antoniou (The Marketplace), Helen Boyd (My Husband Betty), Rachel Kramer Bussel (Gotta Have It), Toni Amato (Pinned Down by Pronouns), Alicia E. Goranson (Supervillianz), filmmaker Tobi Hill-Meyer, musician Rahne Alexander, songwriter Shawna Virago, bloggers Andrea Zanin and Sinclair Sexsmith, and more.

    Is it inborn or learned? Can it be chosen—or even changed? Does it have to be one or the other? These questions may seem abstract—but for parents whose children live outside of gender “norms,” they are very real.No two children who bend the “rules” of gender do so in quite the same way. Felicia threw away her frilly dresses at age three. Sam hid his interest in dolls and “girl things” until high school—when he finally confided his desire to become Sammi. And seven-year-old Maggie, who sports a boys’ basketball uniform and a long blond braid, identifies as “a boy in the front, and a girl in the back.” But all gender-nonconforming children have one thing in common—they need support to thrive in a society that still subscribes to a binary system of gender.Dr. Diane Ehrensaft has worked with children like Felicia, Sam, and Maggie for over 30 years. In Gender Born, Gender Made, she offers parents, clinicians, and educators guidance on both the philosophical dilemmas and the practical, daily concerns of working with children who don’t fit a “typical” gender mold. She debunks outmoded approaches to gender nonconformity that may actually do children harm. And she offers a new framework for helping each child become his or her own unique, most gender-authentic person.

    Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women’s rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the “triple exploitation” of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party’s leading theorists of black women’s exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.

    Early the next year, Madonna had one of the biggest hits of her career, with the single Vogue, and when Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning arrived in cinemas the same year, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the mainstream got hip to New York City's extraordinary ball culture, from which the film and McLaren and Madonna's songs had arisen. Paris Is Burning documented a gay ballroom scene that emerged in Harlem in the mid-1980s, which drew African American and Latino gay and transgender communities to compete against one another for their dancing skills, the verisimilitude of their drag and their ability to walk on the runway. Photographer Chantal Regnault spent many years recording this scene, from which the dance style known as voguing arose. A visual riot of fashion, polysexuality and subversive style, Voguing and the Ballroom Scene of New York 1989-1992 is also an extraordinary document on sexuality and race. The wild years of voguing are vividly captured in hundreds of Regnault's amazing, previously unpublished photographs. The book also features interviews with key figures from the movement, essays, flyers and ephemera. Photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault was born in France. She left Paris after the 1968 uprisings and lived in New York for the next 15 years. At the end of the 1980s she became immersed in Harlem's voguing scene. Also around this time, Regnault developed an interest in Haitian voodoo culture and began to divide her time between Haiti and New York. Her widely published photographs have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, including Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

    So we set out to make our own.the GENDER book is a fun, colorful, community-based resource, which illustrates the beautiful diversity of gender - a gender 101 for anyone and everyone.

    The book is rich with oral history conducted with fourteen Algonquian elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario. These elders share stories about the girls and women of their childhood communities at mid-century (1930–1960), and customs related to pregnancy, birth and post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender, and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women's roles in managing death. The book concludes with a consideration of how oral historians' memories can be applied to building healthier communities today. It is a fascinating and powerful book that will speak to all women.

    No one knows of his secret life as a female impersonator, or of his burning desire to be Josie - the woman he feels he always should have been.Working in a computer graphics business that he and some friends have set up, he does some photo imaging work for a client, which starts him on a roller-coaster ride, involving hired killers, a corrupt politician and the police. To escape death threats, he takes the opportunity to pretend to be his twin sister Jessica, becoming a ski rep for a month in a European ski resort.With more twists and turns than is good for him, he faces the truth, his family and friends, finally taking the decision to become Josie - the girl he always wanted to be, but all the while dealing with issues that are far bigger than he is.

    Never Satisfied is a collection of interviews about how men feel about sex, relationships, and monogamy? Do men know what they want? And more importantly, will women listen?

    Rarely has a book about lust been full of so much love, conflict, and intelligence. If you think you already know what's in these stories, or you think you don't need to know, you're wrong."—Patrick Califa, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of TransgenderismExploring the crossroads of gender and sexuality, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary offers unusually engaging narratives that create a raw and honest depiction of dating, sex, love, and relationships among members of the gender variant community. FTM, MTF, thirdgender, genderqueer, and other non-traditional identities beyond the gender binary of traditional male and female are included in this often heartwarming, occasionally heartbreaking, always heartfelt groundbreaking anthology. From monogamous love and marriage to anonymous sex and one-night hook-ups (and everything in between), these stories offer readers insight into the precarious emotional and practical mechanics of intimacy among gender-variant experiences.Features contributions from award-winning authors including Julia Serano, Sassafras Lowery, and Max Valerio, alongside outstanding new writing by Tribe 8 guitarist and acclaimed film director Silas Howard, activist Joelle Ruby Ryan, filmmaker Ashley Altadonna, SisterSpit alum Cooper Lee Bombardier, and many other unique and talented voices.

    Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

    This book looks at the struggles of Israeli women against this religious and political intrusion. Leading Jewish women's activist and columnist Elana Sztokman investigates their increasing oppression recently, including gender segregation on buses; erasing their faces in newspapers and ads; the silencing of women's voices in the army; and prominent female politicians being barred from conference and events. Blending interviews with original investigative research, Sztokman presents a portrait of this alarming reality and proposes ideas for creating a more egalitarian vision of religious culture in Israeli society.

    For India, the war represents a triumphant settling of scores with Pakistan. If the war is acknowledged in Pakistan, it is cast as an act of betrayal by the Bengalis. None of these nationalist histories convey the human cost of the war. Pakistani and Indian soldiers and Bengali militiamen raped and tortured women on a mass scale. In Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, survivors tell their stories, revealing the power of speaking that deemed unspeakable. They talk of victimization—of rape, loss of status and citizenship, and the “war babies” born after 1971. The women also speak as agents of change, as social workers, caregivers, and wartime fighters. In the conclusion, men who terrorized women during the war recollect their wartime brutality and their postwar efforts to achieve a sense of humanity. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh sheds new light on the relationship among nation, history, and gender in postcolonial South Asia.

    "These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full ofstartling detail and vivid setting. Meitner's range, wit, compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect, make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read" Daisy Fried."

    This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people.

    With some classic essays and some contributions published here for the first time, each chapter in this new volume in the Library of Theological Ethics series presents analytical strategies for understanding the story of womanist scholarship in the service of the black community.The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

    During her career Liz Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that "when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I'd like to be a poet in the theatre." Liz Lochhead has a large and devoted audience and delights audiences where she goes.

    Irwin Krieger is a clinical social worker with many years of experience helping transgender teens. This book brings you the insights gained from his work with these teenagers and their families. According to the author, "Today's teens have access to a wealth of information on the internet. Teenagers who are wondering about gender identity soon find out what it means to be transgender or transsexual. Parents, on the other hand, know little about this topic. When a teenager declares he or she is transgender, parents fear that their child is confused and is choosing a life fraught with danger. I wrote this book to help parents of transgender teens gain an understanding of this complex subject." "Helping Your Transgender Teen" begins with the basic information you and your family need. The central chapters of the book address the fears and concerns most parents of transgender teens share. The final chapters guide you through the steps you can take to discover what is best for your child. Although written for parents, this book is also useful for pediatricians, therapists, educators and others who work with teenagers and young adults. "Helping Your Transgender Teen" provides answers to many of your questions about adolescent gender identity.

    Challenging characterizations of Darwin’s work as a form of genetic determinism, Grosz shows that his writing reveals an insistence on the difference between natural selection and sexual selection, the principles that regulate survival and attractiveness, respectively. Sexual selection complicates natural selection by introducing aesthetic factors and the expression of individual will, desire, or pleasure. Grosz explores how Darwin’s theory of sexual selection transforms philosophy, our understanding of humanity in its male and female forms, our ideas of political relations, and our concepts of art. Connecting the naturalist’s work to the writings of Bergson, Deleuze, and Irigaray, she outlines a postmodern Darwinism that understands all of life as forms of competing and coordinating modes of openness. Although feminists have been suspicious of the concepts of nature and biology central to Darwin’s work, Grosz proposes that his writings are a rich resource for developing a more politicized, radical, and far-reaching feminist understanding of matter, nature, biology, time, and becoming.

    The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.ContributorsVictor BascaraLisa Marie CachoM. Bianet Castellanos Martha Chew Sánchez Roderick A. FergusonGrace Kyungwon HongHelen H. JunKara Keeling Sanda Mayzaw Lwin Jodi Melamed Chandan Reddy Ruby C. TapiaCynthia Tolentino

    At least one verse from every chapter and over one fifth of the total text of the Holy Quran is cited. It is written and structured both to be read in its totality or as individual stand-alone chapters to be sampled at will. This work is thus essential reading not only for Muslims and those interested in Islam and the Holy Quran, but for all those interested in the secrets and mysteries of love as such.‘What the world should understand when it hears the Qur’an.’—Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt‘A masterwork of scholarship and of inspiration.’—H.E. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Distinguished Senior Scholar, the Library of Congress‘Prince Ghazi has produced a definitive study of love in the Qur’an.’—Professor David F. Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge, U.K.‘Love in the Holy Qur’an is bound to become a classic.’—Tamara Sonn, Kenan Professor of Humanities, College of William and MaryH.R.H. Prince Ghazi of Jordan is a Professor of Islamic Philosophy, and is well known as an interfaith activist and author. He obtained his BA from Princeton University in 1988 Summa cum laude; his first PhD from Cambridge University, U.K., in 1993, and his second PhD from Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In 1997 he founded the National Park of the Site of the Baptism of Jesus Christ; in 2001 he established the Great Tafsir Project, the largest online project for exegesis of the Holy Quran, and in 2008 he founded the World Islamic Sciences and Education University. He was the author of the historical Open Letter A Common Word Between Us and You in 2007, and the author of the World Interfaith Harmony Week United Nations General Assembly Resolution in October 2010. Love in the Holy Quran is a translation of his Al-Azhar University PhD. During the first year after its publication in Arabic, it was downloaded over 485,000 times on the Internet.

    Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

    Friedman decries the hypocrisy and mixed messages of our culture (we’re failures if we don’t act sexy, but we’re sluts if we actually pursue sex; we need to be protected from rapists lurking in bushes, but deserve “whatever we get” if we have a drink at a party and wear a skirt), and encourages readers to separate fear from fact, decode the damaging messages all around them, and discover a healthy personal sexuality.Educational and interactive, What You Really Really Want includes revealing quizzes, creative exercises, and reality-based advice about sex and sexuality today. With Friedman’s informed advice to guide them, readers will build new skills for safely expressing their sexuality with lovers and explore effective ways to talk about tricky issues with family and friends—and learn how to make the world a little safer for everyone else’s sexuality along the way.

    It is a wise and practical guide for any transgender person considering or embarking on a gender transition. It covers everything from the beginning stages of exploration and planning through the process of transformation to life after transition. This is the first book written by an experienced professional specifically for transgender clients. It will also be of interest to family, friends, allies, clergy, teachers, helping professionals and anyone who cares about the challenges faced by those who seek to change their physical appearance to match their gender identity.

    While not sure initially if she wanted to be the Star's "woman columnist," Michele tried to use her column as a voice for those who had none. The hundreds of letters that poured in - both those in support of what she was writing and those outraged by it - let her know that what she was doing not only mattered, it was badly needed. For twenty-five years, Michele Landsberg chronicled the lives of women, their struggles and their achievements. She became an activist in support of women's rights, childcare programs, education reform, rape crisis centres, women's work and health, and many more hotly debated issues. Her columns were a force for social and legal change - women turned to her because they knew that they could count on her to tell the real story. In Writing the Revolution, Michele takes the best of those 3000 columns and uses them to reflect on the past, present, and future of women's lives in Canada. While recognizing the success of the women's movement, she knows the fight is not over. A feminist hero and an unflinching activist, Michele is an inspiration to the women who read her column, and to a passionate new generation of women who are fighting to see that the revolution continues.

    Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasis communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasis identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, Unfinished Gestures charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.

    For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.

    Women make up the fastest-growing group of the U.S. prison population, yet prison scholarship largely overlooks the struggles of incarcerated women, and their voices are often silenced both in and out of the prison infrastructure. From the vantage points of those both inside and outside of prisons, this collection of essays and art illuminates many of the distinct experiences and concerns of incarcerated women, including those of girls in prison, abuse and rape, the policing of women, incarcerated motherhood, mental health issues in prisons, incarcerated women's artistic and cultural production, and prisons' impact on families, health, and sexuality. Combining the transcendence, hope and clarity of art with powerful analytical and conceptual tools, Razor Wire Women reveals the gendered dimensions of the incarceration now experienced by a growing number of women in the U.S.

    It covers the practical side of life, including work, money and homemaking, as well as getting to know and make friends with your body, family, mental and physical health, and sex and relationships.Three years in preparation, this guide book to making the most of yourself and your life includes the quotes and comments of more than 7000 women from all over the world, sharing their innermost thoughts on everything from sex to housework, drinking problems and hopes for the future. Providing info at your fingertips, if and when you need it, whichever stage your life is at, Women's Stuff will save you money and make you happier.

    Ever-evolving, ever-improvisatory, the self appears first as a suite of seven ekphrastic poems, then as free verse profiles, riddles, sonnet sequences, and finally a divan of forty-nine ghazals. The discovery the book makes at the end is that the self sees itself best when it is not by itself. Contents: "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," "Profiles," "I Am My Names," "What We Call Vegetables," "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet," "Bull Eclogues" and "A Lover's Recourse.

    Barnett are widely acclaimed for their analyses of women, men, and society. In The Truth About Girls and Boys, they tackle a new, troubling trend in the theorizing of gender: that the learning styles, brain development, motivation, cognitive and spatial abilities, and "natural" inclinations of girls and boys are so fundamentally different, they require unique styles of parenting and education.Ignoring the science that challenges these claims, those who promote such theories make millions while frightening parents and educators into enforcing old stereotypes and reviving unhealthy attitudes in the classroom. Rivers and Barnett unmake the pseudoscientific rationale for this argument, stressing the individuality of each child and the specialness of his or her talents and desires. They recognize that in our culture, girls and boys encounter different stimuli and experiences, yet encouraging children to venture outside their comfort zones helps them realize a multifaceted character. Educating parents, teachers, and general readers in the true nature of the gender game, Rivers and Barnett enable future generations to transform if not transcend the parameters of sexual difference.

    This book tells the history of women in the fire service, and profiles more than 35 women who serve as firefighters in the United States and Canada, from career members of the largest fire departments to volunteers with organizations of only a dozen members. The women in this book share their best stories: responding to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, handling emergency medical calls that may range from the tragic to the ridiculous, living in the fire station, overcoming obstacles. The women featured are as diverse as the job itself, but all share one thing-- their love and commitment to a life of service as a firefighter.

    

    Book by Waldron, Samuel

    Love in the Time of Communism is a fascinating history of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution and its limits. Josie McLellan shows that under communism divorce rates soared, abortion become commonplace and the rate of births outside marriage was amongst the highest in Europe. Nudism went from ban to state-sponsored boom, and erotica became common currency in both the official economy and the black market. Public discussion of sexuality was, however, tightly controlled and there were few opportunities to challenge traditional gender roles or sexual norms. Josie McLellan's pioneering account questions some of our basic assumptions about the relationship between sexuality, politics and society and is a major contribution to our understanding of the everyday emotional lives of postwar Europeans.

    Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian. Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India’s high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though, global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family.

    She decided instead to acquire an education and to participate in the liberation of Egypt from the British occupation. Huda became famous overnight when she led a peaceful walk of veiled women across Cairo in 1919 to free the leaders of the Egyptian resistance who were detained by the British forces. She was then invited by the members of the Bureau of the IAWS (International Alliance for Women's Suffrage) to participate in the international conference in Rome in 1923. Huda became the lifelong friend of Western and other feminist leaders at that conference. It was after this conference in Cairo when she and her two traveling companions removed their face veil upon leaving the train at the railway station and were spontaneously imitated by all the other women in what became a landmark gesture in Egyptian history. In 1923, Huda founded the Egyptian Feminist Union affiliated to the IAWS, and began publishing a French magazine, L'Egyptienne, to circulate information about Egypt's plight and achievements under the occupation, and to promote peace between Eastern and Western countries. She soon became - and remained for many years - one of the Vice-Presidents of the International Organization of Women. Huda Shaarawi alternated political advocacy with social and cultural projects. She spoke on behalf of the Arab and African peoples in International Fora, founding two magazines in Arabic to circulate information in her area of the world. Huda founded schools, supported artists, medical dispensaries, and cottage industries, and participated in funding the establishment of the first entirely Egyptian Bank and its many affiliated projects. A promoter of progress, Huda stubbornly and tirelessly advocated peace, justice, and equality in an increasingly violent world.

    Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."---Gay Community NewsObie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/PerformanceCover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

    But too often they've felt unsupported and unequipped, sometimes doubting their ability to lead - even their right to do so. This book is for those women.

    Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

    Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.

    There are few realms of human experience other than sex in which religion has greater reach and influence. The role of religion, of any faith, to prohibit, regulate, condemn, and reward, is unavoidably prominent in questions of sex—namely with whom, when, how, and why.  In Sex and Religion, Dag Øistein Endsjø examines the myriad and complex religious attitudes towards sex in cultures throughout the world.Endsjø reflects on some of the most significantly problematic areas in the relationship between sex and religion—from sex before or outside of marriage to homosexuality. Through many examples from world religions, he outlines what people mean by sex in a religious context, with whom it’s permissible to have sex, how sex can be a directly religious experience, and what consequences there are for deviance, for both the individual and society. As Endsjø explains, while Buddhist monks call attention to gay sex as a holy mystery, the Christian church questions a homosexual’s place in the church. Some religions may believe that promiscuity leads to hurricanes and nuclear war, and in others God condemns interracial marriage. Sex and Religion reveals there is nothing natural or self-evident about the ways in which various religions prescribe or proscribe and bless or condemn different types of sexuality. Whether sex becomes sacred or abhorrent depends entirely on how a religion defines it. Sex and Religion is a fascinating investigation of mores, meanings, rituals, and rules in many faiths around the globe, and will be of interest to anyone curious about the intersection of these fundamental aspects of human history and experience.

    Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. Kelly E. Hayes provides an intimate and engaging account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gira and one of her devotees, Nazaré da Silva. Combining Nazaré’s spiritual biography with analysis of the gender politics and violence that shapes life on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Hayes highlights Pomba Gira’s role in the rivalries, relationships, and struggles of everyday life in urban Brazil.A DVD of the film Slaves of the Saints is included.

    Here, she tells her story in full for the first time. The daughter of a diplomat, Erin Pizzey was born in China in 1939. One of her formative experiences was seeing her parents and brother being put under house arrest by the Maoists in 1949. This instilled a hatred of totalitarian regimes and for a short time Pizzey even worked for MI6 in Hong Kong. Once relocated in the UK, Pizzey was soon swept up by sixties radicalism and the early days of the emerging Women's Liberation Movement. Opening a small community center for maltreated women in Chiswick in 1971 was to bring Pizzey to the front line of what was becoming a national issue in a time when feminists were still treated with hostility and derision by right-wing figures, but also when left-wing radicals scorned anyone, like Pizzey, who put humanity before ideology. By the mid-1970s, Pizzey found herself under bomb threat and picketed by feminists for allowing men to staff refuges: this led to a long exile from the UK where she kept up her activities and achieved international recognition, while also reinventing herself as a best-selling writer. Erin Pizzey's life and trials have been unique; her story is a compelling one, vital to any understanding of a more revolutionary age and burning issues that still resonate today.

    the themes that run through it are singular while speaking to the universal. the language is precise and unique, the content is intense and brave. you need this book. we all do. danielle montgomery, author of "the woman you write poems about"

    

    Moreover, China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. Sexual desire and sexual activity were viewed as innate human needs, essential to bodily health and well-being, and universal marriage and reproduction served the state by supplying tax-paying subjects, duly bombarded with propaganda about family values. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? In this wonderfully written and enthralling book, Susan Mann answers that question by focusing in turn on state policy, ideas about the physical body, and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bar; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

    The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies.

    Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological.Jeffrey Angles focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. He traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shiro, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.Writing the Love of Boys shows how these authors interjected the subject of male–male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishonen love.

    Similarly, one may know how to do certain things, like ride a bicycle, without being able to articulate in words what that knowledge is. These are examples of what Alexis Shotwell discusses in Knowing Otherwise as phenomena of "implicit understanding." Presenting a systematic analysis of this concept, she highlights how this kind of understanding may be used to ground positive political and social change, such as combating racism in its less overt and more deep-rooted forms.Shotwell begins by distinguishing four basic types of implicit understanding: nonpropositional, skill-based, or practical knowledge; embodied knowledge; potentially propositional knowledge; and affective knowledge. She then develops the notion of a racialized and gendered "common sense," drawing on Gramsci and critical race theorists, and clarifies the idea of embodied knowledge by showing how it operates in the realm of aesthetics. She also examines the role that both negative affects, like shame, and positive affects, like sympathy, can play in moving us away from racism and toward political solidarity and social justice. Finally, Shotwell looks at the politicized experience of one's body in feminist and transgender theories of liberation in order to elucidate the role of situated sensuous knowledge in bringing about social change and political transformation.

    Violence, in other words, is often hidden in plain sight. Space, Place, and Violence seeks to uncover that which is too apparent: to critically question both violent geographies and the geographies of violence. With a focus on direct violence, this book situates violent acts within the context of broader political and structural conditions. Violence, it is argued, is both a social and spatial practice. Adopting a geographic perspective, Space, Place, and Violence provides a critical reading of how violence takes place and also produces place. Specifically, four spatial vignettes - home, school, streets, and community - are introduced, designed so that students may think critically how 'race', sex, gender, and class inform violent geographies and geographies of violence.

    Travis, MD, lauded as one of the founding fathers of the wellness movement, became a parent, he was shocked to discover how unprepared he was for coping with the emotional challenges of parenthood. Here his wife and colleague, Meryn Callander, shares the story of their confident plunge into parenthood and the subsequent unraveling of that confidence, as they discovered themselves floundering, exhausted and struggling to deal with the challenges confronting them. Why Dads Leave reveals the cultural and generational forces that are colluding to create an unac- knowledged epidemic of disappearing dads--fathers leaving their families, physically or emotionally, soon after the birth of a child. Nearly twenty years in the making, this book provides insights and practical ways of preventing and healing the insidious and devastating impact of this dynamic. Beautifully written, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest, Why Dads Leave offers understanding and hope for men and the women who love them.

    In historical and theoretical accounts, it crystallizes the progressive politics that have shaped the academic study of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet few scholars have deliberated directly on the political agency that notions of justice confer on critical practice. In Object Lessons, Robyn Wiegman contemplates this lack of attention, offering the first sustained inquiry into the political desire that galvanizes identity fields. In each chapter, she examines a key debate by considering the political aspirations that shape it. Addressing Women's Studies, she traces the ways that "gender" promises to overcome the exclusions of "women." Turning to Ethnic Studies, she examines the deconstruction of "whiteness" as an antiracist methodology. As she explores American Studies, she links internationalization to the broader quest for noncomplicity in contemporary criticism. Her analysis of Queer Studies demonstrates how the commitment to antinormativity normalizes the field. In the penultimate chapter, Wiegman addresses intersectionality as the most coveted theoretical approach to political resolution in all of these fields.

    What she learned instead were brutal truths about women’s rights, the politics of corruption, the failures of democracy, the mechanism of globalization, and a profound emotional connection that can only be called love. Moore’s fascinating story from the cusp of the global economic meltdown is a look at her time with the first all-women’s dormitory in the history of the country, just kilometers away from the notorious Killing Fields. Her tale is a noble one, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious; staunchly ethical yet conflicted and human.Moore’s in-depth examination of her stint among the first large group of social-justice-minded young women from the impoverished provinces is told in intimate, mood-evocative, beautifully-written first-person prose. Cambodian Grrrl is the first in a series of short essay collections on contemporary media, art, and educational work by, for, and with young women in Southeast Asia. Part memoir and part investigative report, Moore’s story could only be told by her. The result is illuminating, vital reading.

    These are inspiring stories of overcoming adversity (against intolerance and homophobia) and experiencing life after "coming out." Queer teens need tales of what might happen next in their lives, and editor Steve Berman showcases a diversity of events, challenges, and, especially, triumphs.

    Perhaps this gap is due to the severe repression that radicals of any color in America faced as early as the 1930s, and into the Red Scare of the 1950s. To be radical, "and" black "and" a woman was to be forced to the margins and consequently, these women's stories have been deeply buried and all but forgotten by the general public and historians alike.In this exciting work of historical recovery, Dayo F. Gore unearths and examines a dynamic, extended community of black radical women during the early Cold War, including established Communist Party activists such as Claudia Jones, artists and writers such as Beulah Richardson, and lesser-known organizers such as Vicki Garvin and Thelma Dale. These women were part of a black left that laid much of the groundwork for both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and later strains of black radicalism. Radicalism at the Crossroads offers a sustained and in-depth analysis of the political thought and activism of black women radicals during the Cold War period and adds a new dimension to our understanding of this tumultuous and violent time in United States history.

    Thankfully, that is changing. Today, in avariety of post-conflict settings--the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Northern Ireland --international advocates for women's rights have focused bringing issues of sexual violence, discrimination and exclusion into peace-making processes.In On the Frontlines, Fionnuala N� Aol�in, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Naomi Cahn consider such policies in a range of cases and assess the extent to which they have had success in improving women's lives. They argue that there has been too little success, and that this is in part a product of afocus on schematic policies like straightforward political incorporation rather than a broader and deeper attempt to alter the cultures and societies that are at the root of much of the violence and exclusions experienced by women. They contend that this broader approach would not just benefitwomen, however. Gender mainstreaming and increased gender equality has a direct correlation with state stability and functions to preclude further conflict. If we are to have any success in stabilizing failing states, gender needs to move to fore of our efforts. With this in mind, they examine theefforts of transnational organizations, states and civil society in multiple jurisdictions to place gender at the forefront of all post-conflict processes. They offer concrete analysis and practical solutions to ensuring gender centrality in all aspects of peace making and peace enforcement.

    Thus, successive generations of followers have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion. This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did believers respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsiders’ imaginations.“Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today.”— Birgit Meyer, Free University of Amsterdam.

    

    Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go "wacko." Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, "Deep Secrets "reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys' descriptions of their male friendships sound more like "something out of "Love Story" than "Lord of the Flies."" Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to "man up" by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. "No homo" becomes their mantra.These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a "boy crisis," Way argues that boys are experiencing a "crisis of connection" because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. Way argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.

    Allison's book is an epic poem/memoir full of frozen moments that capture a sexual, cultural, and emotional coming of age."Shane Allison taps directly into memory, like a faucet pushed into a maple tree to procure the sweet syrup. Sexy things, embarrassing things, the ugly and the fraught, the things of the child and the things of the man, all pour out in profusion. His testimony--of bullying, racism, and casual homophobia, but also the best rimjob he ever had--has the power to dismantle centuries of chains, the crippling superego." --Kevin KillianShane Allison has published stories and poems in countless magazines and journals. He has also edited numerous anthologies of queer writing and is the author of the collections, Black Fag (Future Tense Books, 2004, out of print), I Want to Eat Chinese Food Off Your Ass (Propaganda Press, 2008), and Slut Machine (Rebel Satori Press, 2011).

    Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.

    The operation was codenamed Anfal which literally means 'the spoils of war'. For the survivors of this campaign, Anfal did not end in September 1988: the aftermath of this catastrophe is as much a part of the Anfal story as the gas attacks, disappearances and life in the camps. This book examines Kurdish women's experience of violence, destruction, the disappearance of loved ones, and incarceration during the Anfal campaign. It explores the survival strategies of these women in the aftermath of genocide. By bringing together and highlighting women's own testimonies, Choman Hardi reconstructs the Anfal narrative in contrast to the current prevailng one which is highly politicised, simplified, and nationalistic. It also addresses women's silences about sexual abuse and rape in a patriarchal society which holds them responsible for having been a victim of sexual violence.

    These poems interrogate, explore, and lovingly respond to Torah texts-the uplifting parts alongside the passages which may challenge contemporary liberal theology. Here are responses to the familiar tales of Genesis, the liberation story of Exodus, the priestly details of Leviticus, the desert wisdom of Numbers, and the anticipation of Deuteronomy. These poems balance feminism with respect for classical traditions of interpretation. They enrich any (re)reading of the Bible, and will inspire readers to their own new responses to these familiar texts.

    In defiance of our one-sided belief system, the book’s premise is this: in the benefits enjoyed, the liabilities suffered, the power, the victimization, the freedoms and the constraints, it all balances out between men and women – and it always has. The book’s purpose is to do what it can to promote a general understanding and perception of this balance throughout the culture at large.It may be presumed at the outset that the reader agrees with common wisdom and perceives imbalance—an imbalance of power enjoyed by men and an imbalance of victimization suffered by women. We have always recognized a world of male power/female victimization, yet that has never been more than half the full story. The missing half can be found. It is contained within a shelf-full of excellent but as yet rather obscure books. What might be thought of as the female power/male victimization half of the story remains obscure because neither sex wants to hear it. Nevertheless, for every female complaint, there is an equal and opposite male complaint. For every one CEO there have been many POWs. Hard/hazardous labor, battlefields, prisons, mines, the streets, the sewers—men have always occupied both extremes, the most and the least enviable positions on earth, the latter in far greater numbers than the former.Imagine, if you will, a gigantic scale with love on one end of the balance beam and respect on the other. This love / respect dynamic upon which balance between the sexes pivots can be described in two brief statements:Throughout history, both sexes have respected men more than they have respected women.Throughout history, both sexes have loved women more than they have loved men.Feminism has made women’s lesser status in all things along the respect axis abundantly clear. Both sexes have listened and both sexes have worked together to change the cultural environment in ways that promote respect for women. That men are less loved, however, may ring true from the start and be met with cynicism just the same. Both sexes receive the female side with empathy and the male side without empathy exactly because both sexes love women more and men less.Note that hostility toward women is given the derogatory label of “misogyny.” That’s because hostility toward women is forbidden. Ours is really more a misandrist (“male bashing”) culture. But few know this word misandry, which would condemn hostility toward men the way the word misogyny condemns hostility toward women. Our culture does not concern itself with the issue of hostility toward men even to the extent of giving it a name. A word that would censure the practice of hating men is of little use in a world wherein expressions of blame, hate and hostility toward men, are everywhere embraced.

    Tracing the journey of BGLT students' emergence, which parallels the modern gay rights movement in America, this monograph provides an overview of data and theory derived from studying BGLT students and student movements in higher education. Offering context for the ways that previously marginalized students in higher education survive and thrive, this issue: Tells the story of their growing visibility on campus Summarizes collective knowledge to date about BGLT identity development Takes stock of transgender students' distinctive position and experiences in higher education Assesses the role of the BGLT campus resource center in supporting students and advancing equity. This issue develops a picture of the ways that BGLT community activism informs scholarship (and vice versa). In the telling of the movement's stories, these lessons suggest a practice of collaborative transformation for advancing the future of BGLT equality in higher education.This is Volume 37 Issue 4 of the Jossey-Bass publication ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education problem, based on thorough research and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.

    In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets in India.Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective.

    Ladin continues the journey of self from one gender to the next--a journey of the soul in and out of flesh

    While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue.Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals.The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture.Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

    Given the diversity in national trajectories, this book covers fifteen countries. This enables the volume to shed light on different kinds of relationships between these groups and the state, as well as on the way they have evolved in recent decades. The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship fills an important gap in the literature on lesbian and gay activism. However, this book also provides important and innovative insights into broader issues in international political science, public policy and comparative politics, as well as issues in social movement studies. These include the role of the state in constructing citizen identities, the heteronormative way in which many traditional citizen entitlements and benefits were constructed, state - civil society relations, judicial activism, the impact of federalism, and the increasing globalization of sexual identities.

    Drawing on archival documents and manuscript sources from Iran and elsewhere, FiroozehKashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women's lives under successive regimes, she chronicles the hygiene campaignsthat cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism.

    As she demonstrates, the resulting social dramas often play out on the bodies of women and African Americans. Holloway discusses the spectacle of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case and the injustice of medical researchers’ use of Henrietta Lacks’s cell line without her or her family’s knowledge or permission. She offers a provocative reading of the Tuskegee syphilis study and a haunting account of the ethical dilemmas that confronted physicians, patients, and families when a hospital became a space for dying rather than healing during Hurricane Katrina; even at that dire moment, race mattered. Private Bodies, Public Texts is a compelling call for a cultural bioethics that attends to the historical and social factors that render some populations more vulnerable than others in medical and legal contexts. Holloway proposes literature as a conceptual anchor for discussions of race, gender, bioethics, and the right to privacy. Literary narratives can accommodate thick description, multiple subjectivities, contradiction, and complexity.

    Celebrated in the Liao History, they were unprecedented. They rode horseback astride, were good at hunting and shooting, and took part in military battles. Several empresses--and one famous bandit chief--led armies against the enemy Song state. Women of the Conquest Dynasties represents a groundbreaking effort to survey the customs and lives of these women from the Kitan and Jurchen tribes who maintained their native traditions of horsemanship, militancy, and sexual independence while excelling in writing poetry and prose and earning praise for their Buddhist piety and Confucian ethics. Although much work has been devoted in the last few years to Chinese women of various periods, this is the first volume to incorporate recent archaeological discoveries and information drawn from Liao and Jin paintings as well as literary sources and standard historical accounts.Conquest women combined agency and assertiveness drawn from steppe traditions with selected aspects of Chinese culture such as ethics and literacy. Empress Chengtian led Liao armies to victory against the Song, successfully ran the state for thirty years during her son's reign, and enjoyed a lengthy and public liaison with her prime minister. Empress Yingtian, the wife of the Liao founder and his assistant in military affairs, famously refused to comply with the steppe custom of following one's husband in death; instead she cut off her right hand and placed it in the late emperor's coffin as a promise to join him later. These confident and talented women were rarely submissive in matters of sexuality and spouse selection, but they were subject to the restrictions of marriage and the levirate if widowed.The women of the northeast stand in vivid contrast to their counterparts in the south, where female identity was molded by a millennia of Confucian ethics and women were increasingly sequestered in the home and constrained by concepts of virtue. Women of the Conquest Dynasties provides new insights into the history of steppe patterns of feminine behavior and will reveal new areas of comparative study.

    Dragiewicz examines the lawsuit Booth v. Hvass, in which fathers' rights groups attempted to use an Equal Protection claim to argue that funding emergency services that target battered women is discriminatory against men. As Dragiewicz shows, this case (which was eventually dismissed) is relevant to widespread efforts to promote a degendered understanding of violence against women in order to eradicate policies and programs that were designed to ameliorate harm to battered women.

    Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, Burmese and Westernized, she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Chie Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyze both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who--whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles--unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernization, and nationalism.The first book-length social history of Burma to utilize gender as a category of sustained analysis, Refiguring Women challenges the reigning nationalist and anticolonial historical narratives of a conceptually and institutionally monolithic colonial modernity that made inevitable the rise of ethnonationalism and xenophobia in Burma. The study demonstrates the irreducible heterogeneity of the colonial encounter and draws attention to the conjoined development of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Ikeya illuminates the important roles that Burmese men and women played as cultural brokers and agents of modernity. She shows how their complex engagements with social reform, feminism, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism rearticulated the boundaries of belonging and foreignness in religious, racial, and ethnic terms.Refiguring Women adds significantly to examinations of gender and race relations, modernization, and nationalism in colonized regions. It will be of interest to a broad audience--not least those working in the fields of Southeast Asian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.

    

    The second edition of this book features significant new material on the changing status of gender, same sex marriage, and transgender. After introducing key concepts in gender and sexuality, the authors explore topics such as sexual desire, the role of biology, sexual behavior, uncommitted sexual relationships and "hooking up," marriage and cohabitation, and the politics of sexuality. Examples from popular culture, film, and media invite readers to engage with key concepts. This is an ideal book for courses on gender, sexuality, marriage and family, or social problems.

    Stephen Marshall, in "The City on the Hill from Below," interrogates the political thought of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to reveal a vital tradition of American political theorizing and engagement with an American political imaginary forged by the City on the Hill.Originally articulated to describe colonial settlement, state formation, and national consolidation, the image of the City on the Hill has been transformed into one richly suited to assessing and transforming American political evil. "The City on the Hill from Below" shows how African American political thinkers appropriated and revised languages of biblical prophecy and American republicanism.

    This critical book examines the performance of masculinity in these stories, particularly in light of the waning years of Victoria's reign when changing historical, political and social pressures altered the definition of masculinity. An examination of aestheticism, multicultural religious and spiritual forces, and the role of genre are key to understanding how these authors scripted masculinity onto non-human character. Topics covered include the roles of violence, rebellion, escape, spirituality, social hierarchies and law. A vital addition to the scholarly examination of children's literature.

    Providing detailed discussions of not only bearded men but also beardless boys, bearded women, and half-bearded hermaphrodites, author Mark Albert Johnston argues that attending closely to early modern English culture's treatment of the beard as a fetish object ultimately exposes the contingency of categories like sex, gender, age, race, and sexuality. Johnston mines a diverse cross-section of contemporary discourses -- adult and children's drama, narrative verse and prose, popular ballads, epigrams and proverbs, historical accounts, pamphlet literature, diaries, letters, wills, court records and legal documents, medical and surgical manuals, lectures, sermons, almanacs, and calendars -- in order to provide proof for his cultural claims. Johnston's evidence invokes some of the period's most famous voices -- William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Phillip Stubbes, John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Samuel Pepys, for example -- but Johnston also introduces us to an array of lesser-known Renaissance authors and playwrights whose works support the notion that the beard was a palimpsestic site of contested meaning at which complex and contradictory values clash and converge. Johnston's reading of Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological theories of the fetish phenomenon acknowledges their divergent emphases -- erotic, economic, racial and religious -- while suggesting that the imbrication of diverse registers that fetish accomplishes facilitates its cultural and psychic naturalizing function.

    The story was collected in Vonnegut's famous anthology Welcome to the Monkey House and was reprinted online by The Saturday Evening Post in 2011.