Best of
Gender-Studies

1

Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood


Frederick Joseph
    From fatherhood, and "manning up" to abuse and therapy, he fearlessly and thoughtfully tackles the complex realities of men's lives today and their significance for society, lending his insights as a Black man.Written in Joseph's unique voice, with an intelligence and raw honesty that demonstrates both his vulnerability and compassion, Patriarchy Blues forces us to consider the joys, pains, and destructive nature of manhood and the stereotypes it engenders.

Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color & Trans People of Color: A Critical Intersection of Gender Violence & State Violence


Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
    It includes fact sheets, ideas for organizing, and sample tools created by other organizations.

The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex


Gayle S. Rubin
    She asserts that these writers fail to adequately explain women's subjugation; therefore, Rubin offers a reinterpretation of their ideas. Rubin addresses Marxist thought by identifying women's role within a capitalist society. She argues that the reproduction of labor power depends upon women's housework to transform commodities into sustenance for the worker. A capitalistic system cannot generate surplus without women, yet society does not grant women access to the resulting capital.

The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland


Joanna Mishtal
    After this initial wave of enthusiasm, however, political forces that had lain concealed during the state socialist era began to emerge and establish a new religious-nationalist orthodoxy. While Solidarity garnered most of the credit for democratization in Poland, it had worked quietly with the Catholic Church, to which a large majority of Poles at least nominally adhered. As the church emerged as a political force in the Polish Sejm and Senate, it precipitated a rapid erosion of women’s reproductive rights, especially the right to abortion, which had been relatively well established under the former regime.The Politics of Morality is an anthropological study of this expansion of power by the religious right and its effects on individual rights and social mores. It explores the contradictions of postsocialist democratization in Poland: an emerging democracy on one hand, and a declining tolerance for reproductive rights, women’s rights, and political and religious pluralism on the other. Yet, as this thoroughly researched study shows, women resist these strictures by pursuing abortion illegally, defying religious prohibitions on contraception, and organizing into advocacy groups. As struggles around reproductive rights continue in Poland, these resistances and unofficial practices reveal the sharp limits of religious form of governance.

Grandmother-Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds


R.B. Lemberg
    Between them prowled small lions, feather-maned and winged, that bared at me thin fangs of sharpened emerald.

Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood Volume 2


Merlin Stone
    

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist


Frans de WaalFrans de Waal
    De Waal illuminates their behavioral and biological differences, and compares and contrasts them with human behavior: male domination and territoriality in chimpanzees and the female-led pacific society of bonobos.In his classic conversational style and a narrative rich in anecdotes and wry observations, de Waal tackles topics including gender identity, sexuality, gender-based violence, same-sex rivalry, homosexuality, friendship, and nurturance. He reveals how evolutionary biology can inform a more nuanced—and equitable—cultural understanding of gender. Ultimately, he argues, our two nearest primate relatives are equally close to us, and equally relevant. Considering all available evidence, we can learn much about ourselves and embrace our similarities as well as our differences.

Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back


Julia SeranoJulia Serano
    The author of landmark manifesto Whipping Girl exposes the violent ways we are all sexualized–then offers a bold path for resistance Feminists have long challenged the ways in which men tend to sexualize women. But pioneering activist, biologist, and trans woman Julia Serano argues that sexualization is a far more pervasive problem, as it’s something that we all do to other people, often without being aware of it. Why do we perceive men as sexual predators and women as sexual objects? Why are LGBTQ+ people stereotyped as being sexually indiscriminate and deceptive? Why are people of color still being hypersexualized? These stereotypes push minorities farther into the margins, and even the privileged are policed from transgressing, lest they also become targets. Many view sexualization as a mere component of sexism, racism, or queerphobia, but Serano argues that liberation from sexual violence comes through collectively confronting sexualization itself.

Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Essays and studies)


Kevin Siena
    In the early sixteenth century the disease quickly emerged as a powerful cultural force. Just as powerful were the responses of doctors, bureaucrats, moralists, playwrights, and satirists. These ten essays gauge the impact of sexual disease on early modern society by exploring the ways in which European culture reacted to the presence of a new deadly sexual infection. Articles about scientific and medical responses analyze how physicians incorporated the disease within existing intellectual frameworks. Studies in literary and metaphoric responses examine how early modern writers put images of sexual infection and the diseased body to a range of rhetorical and political uses. Finally, essays about institutional and policing responses chronicle how authorities responded to the crisis and how these public health responses linked up with wider campaigns to police sexuality.

The Forerunner


Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.