With her customary boldness and insight, Bell Hooks critically reflects on the impact of birth control and the women's movement on our lives. Resisting the notion that love and writing don't mix, she begins a fifteen-year relationship with a gifted poet and scholar, who inspires and encourages her. Writing the acclaimed book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at the age of nineteen, she begins to emerge as a brilliant social critic and public intellectual. Wounds of Passion describes a woman's struggle to devote herself to writing, sharing the difficulties, the triumphs, the pleasures, and the dangers. Eloquent and powerful, this book lets us see the ways one woman writer works to find her own voice while creating a love relationship based on feminist thinking. With courage and wisdom she reveals intimate details and provocative ideas, offering an illuminating vision of a writer's life.

    Explains what patriarchy is (and isn't), how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it.

    Comprising a range of voices from both within and outside the academy, this collection draws from traditional feminisms, postmodern feminism, queer theory, and sex radicalism. It stretches the boundaries of contemporary feminism, holding accountable both traditional feminism for stigmatizing sex workers, and also the sex industry for its sexist practices.

    We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we see the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.Recommended by the Association of Black Women Historians.

    A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of OC woman, OCO central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed. "

    Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

    

    Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society.The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how `real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural posit

    Example and antagonist to generations of artists and performers?revered by Robert Wilson, denounced by Kenneth Anger, imitated by Andy Warhol?Jack Smith is ready for his close-up, on location in the streets and ruins of the world. This volume recognizes Smith?s seminal contributions and the need for a significant rethinking of the history of the American avant-garde.

    To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what “one” is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire. Power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that which forms reflexivity as well. Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser, this challenging and lucid work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.If we take Hegel and Nietzsche seriously, then the "inner life" of consciousness and, indeed, of conscience, not only is fabricated by power, but becomes one of the ways in which power is anchored in subjectivity. The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be "internalized" by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience.To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that "turns against itself" is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as “internalized.” Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power.This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

    Queerly Classed highlights the voices of those whose experiences of class-combined with race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and age to explode stereotypes of queers aspiring to assimilate into the mainstream of the American middle class.

    It advocates the acceptance of lesbians into the Jewish tradition by offering new interpretations of the Torah traditionally regarded as prohibitive of homosexuality. The book counters the millenia of Midrashim (scholarly comment on the Torah) condemning gays and lesbians, by examining the culture of biblical lawgivers and the culture of the commentators themselves.

    Their day-to-day lives are defined by their past history as colonized peoples, often in ways that are subtle or hard to define. In Dangerous Liaisons, eminent contributors address the issues raised by the postcolonial condition, considering nationhood, history, gender, and identity from an inter-disciplinary perspective.Among the questions they address are: What are the boundaries of race and ethnicity in a diasporic world? How have women been so effectively excluded from national power? What have been the historical aftermaths of different forms of colonialism? What are the cultural and political consequences of colonial partitions of the nation-state? Representing an essential intervention, Dangerous Liaisons is a crucial guidebook for those concerned with understanding postcoloniality at the moment when it is becoming more and more widely discussed.

    Carol Queen. Whether writing about the joys of being spanked into erotic bliss, performing in a red-light district peep show, partaking of the pleasures of the new safe sex clubs, or lobbying for the pro-pornography platform, Queen is an enthusiastic advocate for sexual pleasure.

    Analyzing different instances of injured bodies, Peggy Phelan considers what sustained attention to the affective force of trauma might yield for critical theory. Advocating what she calls "performative writing", she creates an extraordinary fusion of critical and creative thinking which erodes the distinction between art and theory, fact and fiction. The bodies she examines here include Christ's, as represented in Caravaggio's painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's bodies as they were performed during the Senate hearings, the disinterred body of the Rose Theatre, exemplary bodies reconstructed through psychoanalytic talking cures, and the filmic bodies created by Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, and Peter Friedman in Silverlake Life: The View From Here. This new work by the highly-acclaimed author of Unmarked makes a stunning advance in performance theory in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies.

    . . Radclyffe Hall is getting a fresh look. . . . Glasgow has chosen these letters well and provides helpful context.--Kirkus Review Many assumptions have been made about the degree to which Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, may be autobiographical. Your John dismisses such notions. This exhaustive collection of letters written between 1934 and 1942 to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian �migr� with whom Hall fell deeply in love are detailed, intimate records of Hall's personal life and convictions. . . . the collection is a heart-wrenching record of how politics, money, and geography converged to undermine these women's dreams.--Publisher's Weekly This landmark book represents the first publication of original writing by Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, in over 50 years. One of the most famous and influential lesbian novelists of the twentieth century, Hall became a cause clbre in 1928, upon the publication of her novel The Well of Loneliness, when the British government brought action on behalf of the Crown to declare the book obscene. Probably the most widely read lesbian novel ever written, the book has been continuously in print since its first publication and remains to this day an important part of the literary landscape. Expertly deciphered and edited by Hall scholar and biographer Joanne Glasgow, Your John is a selection of Hall's love letters to Evguenia Souline, a White Russian �migr� with whom Hall fell completely and passionately in love in the summer of 1934. Written between this first meeting and the onset of Hall's last illness in 1942, these letters detail Hall's growing obsession, the pain to her life partner Una Troubridge of this betrayal, and the poignant hopelessness of a happy resolution for any of the three women. It was ultimately this relationship, Glasgow argues, which tragically precipitated the decline in Hall's creative work and her health. The letters also provide important new information about her views on lesbianism and take us well beyond the artistic limits she imposed on the characters in The Well of Loneliness. They shed light on her views on religion, politics, war, and the literary and artistic scene. Illuminating both the nature of her relationships and her views on the current politics of the time, Your John will greatly extend the range of our knowledge about Radclyffe Hall.

    Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say.The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T- in Denon's No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Cr�billon fils's Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Pr�vost's The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters' words and their true intentions -- the libertine double entendre -- are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot's Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Cr�billon fils's Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized -- or degenerate -- erotics are the subjects of both Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage and Laclos's On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade's Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism.

    An examination of feminist themes in children's and young adult's literature covers such topics as friendship, marriage, and community.

    Emphasizing the integration of traditional labor history topics with historical accounts of gender, female subjectivity, and community, this volume focuses on the experience of working women at mid-century, especially those laboring in the urban industrial sector. In its exploration of working women’s agency and consciousness, this collection offers rich detail regarding women’s lives as daughters, housewives, mothers, factory workers, trade union leaders, and political activists.Widely seen as a hostile sexualized space, the modern factory was considered a threat, not only to the virtue of working women, but also to the survival of the family, and thus, the future of the nation. Yet working-class women continued to labor outside the home and remained highly visible in the expanding world of modern industry. In nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala, the contributors make extensive use of oral histories to describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. The volume includes discussion of previously neglected topics such as single motherhood, women’s struggle against domestic violence, and the role of women as both desiring and desired subjects.Contributors. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Lynn Pedersen Cluff, John D. French, Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Heidi Tinsman, Theresa R. Veccia, Barbara Weinstein

    What constitutes a narrative as "lesbian"? Hoogland provides original readings of such films as Basic Instinct and Bitter Moon, and novels such as The Bell Jar and Friends and Relations in order to trace the way lesbian identities are negotiated in Western culture.