Best of
Gender-And-Sexuality

2010

Fucking Trans Women (Issue #0)


Mira Bellwether - 2010
    Sex is a very important part of my life, a very important part of all our lives, but so very little writing has been done on the sex lives of trans women that doesn’t write us off in one way or another. I found myself looking for a guide, an instruction manual, anything beyond essays on gender and problems. Fucking Trans Women is that guide." "Includes:-How-to guides-Sex stories-Instructions for various kinds of sex acts-The diversity of trans women's bodies-Trashy art & comic strips-Moments of triumph & tender anecdotes-Passionate explorations of our lusty bodies-Diagrams, and so much more!"

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation


Kate Bornstein - 2010
    Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals


Alan F. Johnson - 2010
    Well-known Evangelical leaders—individuals and couples, males and females from a broad range of denominational affiliation and ethnic diversity—share their surprising journeys from a more or less restrictive view to an open inclusive view that recognizes a full shared partnership of leadership in the home and in the church based on gifts not gender. How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership offers a positive vision for the future of women and men together as partners of equal worth without competitiveness in the work of equipping this and the next generation of Christian disciples for the ‘work of ministry’ and service in the Kingdom of God.

Shepherding Women in Pain: Real Women, Real Issues, and What You Need to Know to Truly Help


Bev Hislop - 2010
    Yet, most are not prepared for this aspect of ministering to women in real pain over real issues.  Designed to give leaders and care givers greater understanding, insights for shepherding, and referral resources, Shepherding Women in Pain is a compilation from contributors who have expertise and experience with women on the given issue. For example Stacey Womack, founder and executive director of Abuse Recovery Ministry & Services, wrote the chapter on domestic violence and Kimberley Davidson, founder of Olive Branch Outreach, authored the chapter discussing eating disorders.The reader will be provided concise, practical, and grace-infused information designed to help women deal constructively with the trauma of their life experiences.  This book will serve as a key resource--read and re-read often--to those who serve women in pain.

Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp


Christopher R. Browning - 2010
    In 1972 the Hamburg State Court acquitted Walter Becker, the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, of war crimes committed against Jews. Thirty years before, Becker had been responsible for liquidating the nearby Jewish ghetto, sending nearly 4,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka and 1,600 to slave-labor factories. The shocking acquittal, delivered despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of survivors, drives this author’s inquiry. Drawing on the rich testimony of survivors of the Starachowice slave-labor camps, Christopher R. Browning examines the experiences and survival strategies of the Jewish prisoners and the policies and personnel of the Nazi guard. From the killings in the market square in 1942 through the succession of brutal camp regimes, there are stories of heroism, of corruption and retribution, of desperate choices forced on husbands and wives, parents and children. In the end, the ties of family and neighbor are the sinews of survival. 10 photos.

Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging


Rabab Abdulhadi - 2010
    Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and between each other.Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic studies.

Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945


Jennifer Guglielmo - 2010
    Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women of New York and New Jersey who helped shape the vibrant radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement. Tracing two generations of women who worked in the needle and textile trades, she explores the ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. She also shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans.

The Wolf House


Mary Borsellino - 2010
    Love wants. It wants like hunger and suffocation. It wants like gravity."Vampires run in packs here, and they're not easy to avoid if they want you. Bette, Jay, and their friends, other smart, talented, angry, punk musicians, artists, and high-school misfits, tangle with the Wolf House as they join with &mdash and sometimes fight against &mdash the toughest vampire hunters in town, a band called Remember the Stars, who rock the local club scene and then fight the vampire gangs after the show.Blake, the leader of the Wolf House, finds them all endlessly entertaining. They don't care what he thinks. He'll die, or they'll die trying. And one after another, they die."Everyone dies. Everything changes. Those are just the truths of the world. Everyone changes.""Electrifying. Chilling. Enthralling. Amazing. One of the truest young voices I ve ever heard, with a plot that keeps you stuck to the pages and stops the breath in your throat.. This is a writer who will go farther than perhaps even she imagines. L.J. Smith, author of "The Vampire Diaries series"Mary Borsellino 's The Wolf House introduces readers to a group of smart, hip, snarky, young friends who like to eat pizza, gossip, watch horror movies, and, oh yeah, hang out with vampires. Just your typical high school students. Nancy A. Collins, author of the "Vamps" seriesMary Borsellino is one of the up-and-coming writers of this generation, regardless of genre. As it happens, she writes some of the very best vampire fiction in the vast sea of vamplit that is out there. Narrelle Harris, author of "The Opposite of Life"Mary does characterisation like she is wielding a sympathetic, observant scalpel. Karen Healey, author of "Guardian of the Dead"

Filling the Void: Interviews About Quitting Drinking + Using


Cindy Gretchen Ovenrack Crabb - 2010
    Includes positive and negative roles drinking played in their lives, what brought them to the decision to quit, what worked and didn't, etc. The stories are really varied and inspiring. Interviewees include: Erick Lyle, Cindy and Caty Crabb, Artmoose, and John Geek.

Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons


Megan Sweeney - 2010
    Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women prisoners, Megan Sweeney examines how incarcerated women use available reading materials to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures.

Kali Rising: Foundational Principles of Tantra for a Transforming Planet


Rudolph M. Ballentine - 2010
    For over a thousand years, Tantra has shocked, scandalized, and yet continually infiltrated and revitalized the most ancient philosophies and religions of the world. In this little volume, you will learn why - and discover how it is even more relevant than ever in this period of drastic transformation and change. The principles of tantra lie at the heart of yoga, alchemy, Buddhism, holistic medi- cine, sexuality, and clarify the central dynamic that faces humanity as we attempt to attain a new planetary consciousness - one that promises move us beyond linear time, three-dimensional space and the con- fines of causality! Step into a new and elec- tric way of living..... Rudolph Ballentine, MD is the author of Diet and Nutrition and Radical Healing and former President of the Himalayan Institute. He worked closely with and studied under the guidance of Swami Rama for 20 years.

From Social Silence to Social Science: Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV AIDS and Gender in South Africa


Vasu Reddy - 2010
    Drawing particular attention to the risk behaviors and treatment needs of South Africans who engage in homosexual sex, the results of this study explain why same-sex sexuality is increasingly noted in today’s efforts to study, test, and prevent the spread of HIV infection in the region. Relevant to scholarly debates about HIV and AIDS, this resource offers essential sociological data for anyone involved in research, policymaking, advocacy, and community development in conflicted regions.

Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right


Whitney Strub - 2010
    This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "family values" agenda that shifted the country to the right.Perversion for Profit traces the anatomy of this trend and the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which has emphasized social issues over racial and economic inequality. Conducting his own extensive research, Whitney Strub vividly recreates the debates over obscenity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against purveyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the differing standards applied to heterosexual and homosexual pornography. He follows the rise of the influential Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, feminist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the "porno chic" moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy far beyond the issue of sexual decency.Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New Right's use of pornography as a political tool. As he demonstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the mercy of Republican rhetoric. In placing debates about pornography at the forefront of American postwar history, Strub revolutionizes our understanding of sex and American politics.

States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century


Sherene H. Razack - 2010
    The collection examines Indigenous peoples within the Canadian settler state and Indigenous women within feminism; the challenges posed by the settler state for women of colour and Indigenous women; and the possibilities and limits of an anti-colonial praxis. Critical race feminism, like critical race theory more broadly, interrogates questions about race and gender through an emancipatory lens, posing fundamental questions about the persistence if not magnification of race and the "colour line" in the twenty-first century. The writers of these articles – whether exploring campus politics around issues of equity, the media’s circulation of ideas about a tolerant multicultural and feminist Canada, security practices that confine people of colour to spaces of exception, Indigenous women’s navigation of both nationalism and feminism, Western feminist responses to the War on Terror, or the new forms of whiteness that persist in ideas about a post-racial world or in transnational movements for social justice – insist that we must study racialized power in all its gender and class dimensions. The contributors are all members of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity. Sherene Razack is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, and Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Sunera Thobani is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of British Columbia. She is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Malinda Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, and author of Beyond the ‘African Tragedy’: Discourses on Development and the Global Economy.

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination


Darieck Scott - 2010
    Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities


Joan Spade - 2010
    Focusing on contemporary contributions to the field while incorporating classical and theoretical arguments, this collection of creative articles by top scholars explains how the complex, evolving pattern of gender studies is constructed interpersonally, institutionally, and culturally.

Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences


Rebecca M. Jordan-Young - 2010
    That's taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren't more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of "human brain organization theory," Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn't scientific at all.Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. "The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure... Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development."

Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands


Madina Tlostanova - 2010
    The forms it takes, she finds, resist interpretation through the lenses of both Western feminist theory and woman of color feminism. Tlostanova argues that Eurasian borderland feminism must chart a third path sensitive to the region's own unique past.

Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry


Melissa Hope Ditmore - 2010
    From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers theoretical discussions as well empirical case studies, providing new ways to link theory with lived experiences. The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights. The book will equip any reader with new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry, challenging readers to explore the topic of sex work in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions.

Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body


Sarah Alison Miller - 2010
    In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages-the female body-exists in special relation to medieval teratology insofar as it resists the customary marginalization that defined most other monstrous groups in the Middle Ages. Though medieval maps located the monstrous races on the distant margins of the civilized world, the monstrous female body took the form of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. It was, therefore, pervasive, proximate, and necessary on social, sexual, and reproductive grounds. Miller considers several significant texts representing authoritative discourses on female monstrosity in the Middle Ages: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albert the Great, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), and Julian of Norwich's Showings. Through comparative analysis, Miller grapples with the monster's semantic flexibility while simultaneously working towards a composite image of late-medieval female monstrosity whose features are stable enough to define. Whether this body is discursively constructed as an Ovidian body, a medicalized body, or a mystical body, its corporeal boundaries fail to form properly: it is a body out of bounds.

Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century


Gillian M. Rodger - 2010
    Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these entertainments, and Rodger profiles key male impersonators Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner while examining how both gender and sexuality gave shape to variety. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, variety theater developed into a platform for ideas about race and whiteness.As some in the working class moved up into the middling classes, they took their affinity for variety with them, transforming and broadening middle-class values. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima places the saloon keepers, managers, male impersonators, minstrels, acrobats, singers, and dancers of the variety era within economic and social contexts by examining the business models of variety shows and their primarily white, working-class urban audiences. Rodger traces the transformation of variety from sexualized entertainment to more family-friendly fare, a domestication that mirrored efforts to regulate the industry, as well as the adoption of aspects of middle-class culture and values by the shows' performers, managers, and consumers.

Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory


Janet Liebman Jacobs - 2010
    She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust's effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.

Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain


Deborah Cohler - 2010
    A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.

Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America


Leslie J. Reagan - 2010
    This epidemic would ultimately transform abortion politics, produce new science, and help build two of the most enduring social movements of the late twentieth century--the reproductive rights and the disability rights movements. At most a minor rash and fever for women, German measles (also known as rubella), if contracted during pregnancy, could result in miscarriages, infant deaths, and serious birth defects in the newborn. Award-winning writer Leslie J. Reagan chronicles for the first time the discoveries and dilemmas of this disease in a book full of intimate stories--including riveting courtroom testimony, secret investigations of women and doctors for abortion, and startling media portraits of children with disabilities. In exploring a disease that changed America, Dangerous Pregnancies powerfully illuminates social movements that still shape individual lives, pregnancy, medicine, law, and politics.