Best of
Gender-Studies

1991

Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 1991
    Highly recommended... " --Choice..". the book challenges assumptions and pushes historic and geographical boundaries that must be altered if women of all colors are to win the struggles thrust upon us by the 'new world order' of the 1990s." --New Directions for Women"This surely is a book for anyone trying to comprehend the ways sexism fuels racism in a post-colonial, post-Cold War world that remains dangerous for most women." --Cynthia H. Enloe..". provocative analyses of the simultaneous oppressions of race, class, gender and sexuality... a powerful collection." --Gloria Anzaldua..". propels third world feminist perspectives from the periphery to the cutting edge of feminist theory in the 1990s." --Aihwa Ong..". a carefully presented wealth of much-needed information." --Audre Lorde..". it is a significant book." --The Bloomsbury Review..". excellent... The nondoctrinaire approach to the Third World and to feminism in general is refreshing and compelling." --World Literature Today..". an excellent collection of essays examining 'Third World' feminism." --The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural TheoryThese essays document the debates, conflicts, and contradictions among those engaged in developing third world feminist theory and politics. Contributors: Evelyne Accad, M. Jacqui Alexander, Carmen Barroso, Cristina Bruschini, Rey Chow, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Angela Gilliam, Faye V. Harrison, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, Barbara Smith, Nayereh Tohidi, Lourdes Torres, Cheryl L. West, & Nellie Wong.

Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality


Susan McClary - 1991
    “. . . this is a major book . . . [McClary’s] achievement borders on the miraculous.” The Village Voice“No one will read these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and staid professionals.” Choice“Feminine Endings, a provocative ‘sexual politics’ of Western classical or art music, rocks conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to the wealth of ideas and possibilities [McClary’s] book presents. All music-lovers should read it, and cheer.” The Women’s Review of Books"McClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity."-The New York Review of Books

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women


Susan Faludi - 1991
    Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date. When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.With passion and precision, Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.

Post-Porn Modernist


Annie Sprinkle - 1991
    Originally published by Art Unlimited (Amsterdam, 1991). 150 photos. Size D.

Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front


Judy Barrett Litoff - 1991
    I must admit I'm not exactly the same girl you left-I'm twice as independent as I used to be and to top it off, I sometimes think I've become 'hard as nails'. . . . Also--more and more I've been living exactly as I want to . . . I do as I damn please."[These tough words from the wife of a soldier show that World War Ii changed much more than just international politics.]"From a fascinating collection of letters, filled with wonderfully distinctive human stories, Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith have shpaed a rare and brilliant book that transports the reader back in time to an unforgettable era."--Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream."This is a wonderful volume, full of admirable women struggling in a difficult situation, doing their best for their families and their country. Ah, the memories it brings back! Highly recommended for those who lived through the war, and for those who want to understand it."--Stephen E. Ambrose, author of Eisenhower and D-Day, June 6, 1944"Offering a remarkable view into the lives of ordinary women during wartime, this book will enlighten and catch at the hearts of general readers and cause historians to reconsider how women experienced World War II."-Susan M. Hartmann, author of The Home Front and Beyond."From among 25,000 of an estimated six billion letters sent overseas during World War II, Litoff and Smith have culled and skillfully edited a sampling by 400 American women. These letters, starting with one to a seaman wounded at Pearl Harbor, are compelling documents of home-front life in varied ethnic, cultural, and financial milieus. Tragic, touching, and funny, the correspondence is full of prosaic news and gossip about jobs and neighbors, along with accounts of births and intimate allusions to love-making. The stress of separation was intensified for women whose loved ones were hospitalized, or imprisoned as either conscientious objectors or security risks. Some women wrote General MacArthur and others for news of missing men or to obtain details of their deaths. Many of these heartrending documents also express acceptance-and even pride-in the sacrifices required by war."--Publishers Weekly."Other scholars of WW II have published letters written home by servicemen, but this is the first collection sampling the letters written by sisters, sweethearts, wives, and mothers, saved by thousands of servicemen. Chapters are organized around themes that were important to these women: courtship, marriage, motherhood, work, sacrifices. . . . What women tell readers in these letters about their concerns and their wartime feelings will cause historians [readers?] to rethink what has been written about the homefront."--Choice."Despite the popular appeal of Rosie the Riveter, nine out of ten mothers with children under six were not in the labor force, which helps to account for the vast outpouring of mail from the home front to 'our boys' in the European and Pacific theaters. Some couples wrote every day for four years. This is the rich historic documentation that the authors have drawn upon to create a panoramic pastiche of indefatigable, energetic, patriotic female letter writers in the war years. . . . One is struck by the hard-headed practicality of many of the letters-stories of plucky, sometimes even grumpy, coping. There are letters of growing independence, with strong and at times explicit indication that the boyfriend or husband will be facing a very different woman upon his return from the one he 'knew' when he disembarked for his own, often terrible, venture. . . . Every war leaves mothers with broken hearts. What this volume most remarkably demonstrates is just how prepared American women on the home front were for that dread eventuality."--Jean Bethke Elshtain in the Journal of American History."Fascinating and often heartbreaking letters. . . . The letters illuminate a time when sex roles were first showing the changes that would culminate in the women's movement. 'I must admit I'm not exactly the same girl you left, ' Edith Speert wrote to her husband, Victor, in 1945. 'I'm twice as independent as I used t be, and I sometimes think I've become hard as nails. I don't think my changes will affect our relationship.'. . . In the end, it is the small human dramas in these letters that stand out. Anne Gudis, miffed to distraction by her soldier-swain Sam Kramer, writes what may be the shortest Dear John on record: 'Mr. Kramer: Go to hell! With love, Anne Gudis.' A woman working at a Honolulu nightclub assures a pilot that she'll wait for him-until she's 20. The wife of an Air Corps navigator reads in a news story that only 15 of 1,500 Allied bombers were lost in a raid over Europe and later learns that her husband died in one of the 15. And a grieving mother whose son died in the Pacific asks Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in desperation, 'Please general he was a good boy, wasn't he? Did he die a hard death?'"--Smithsonian."'They made it possible for me to retain my sanity in an insane world, ' wrote one pilot about the letters his wife sent him throughout World War II. The letters contained in this collection explain the soldier's sentiments. Whether full of passionate longing for a missing sweetheart or merely detailing domestic gossip, the letters offer a rich introduction to how American women experienced the war. Since military authorities ordered soldiers not to keep any letters written them by their loved ones, the authors have done a magnificent service in obtaining letters that soldiers either surreptitiously hid or whose authors copied them before sending them on."--Library Journal.

La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth


Sandra Messinger Cypess - 1991
    This is the first serious study tracing La Malinche in texts from the conquest period to the present day.

Women's Madness: Misogyny Or Mental Illness?


Jane M. Ussher - 1991
    Using an historical perspective, she analyzes the evidence for misogyny in different cultures and its effects on women. In a detailed examination of witchcraft - and the contradictory arguments that witchcraft was either evidence of misogyny or mental illness - Ussher sets the background for her investigation of women's madness from the Victorian era to the 20th century. She moves on to assess various critiques of the concept of madness, including those from sociologists, Marxists, the 1960s' anti-psychiatrists and feminists, and exposes their ultimate failure to explain or understand women's experience of what is called "madness". She surveys how and why women become "mad", or are labelled "mad" and conducts a critical analysis of the present forms of intervention from psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists. Finally, she suggests constructive alternatives which reconcile the needs of individual women with the needs of women as a group. Shortlisted for MIND Book of the Year 1991.

Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing


Thomas R. Golden - 1991
    The book explains the uniqueness of the masculine side of healing and shows how this can manifests in men and also in women. Swallowed by a Snake is meant to be a map and a guide through the experience of loss. Helping you move through the pain of loss and into a place of healing and transformation. Discover new and powerful ways to heal. How the genders differ in thei healing. Greater understanding between partners. Examples of successful and uniqueness. New ways to understnad your grief. Ways the individual's loss can impact the entire family.

Women's Growth In Connection: Writings from the Stone Center


Judith V. Jordan - 1991
    It offers an alternative to traditional models of human development that define health and maturity in terms of separation and consistently define women as deficient. Written by leading clinicians and teachers from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, the book foregrounds women's meaning systems, values, and organization of experiences, which often revolve around relationships rather than the self. The authors set out basic relational principles and consider the implications for life challenges that many women face, as well as for psychotherapy.

Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory


Philomena Essed - 1991
    As an interdisciplinary analysis of gendered social constructions of racism, it breaks new ground. Essed problematizes and reinterprets many of the meanings and everyday practices that the majority of society has come to take for granted. She addresses crucial but largely neglected dimensions of racism: how it is experienced; how black women recognize its covert manifestations; how they acquire this knowledge; and how they challenge racism in everyday life. To answer these questions, over two thousand experiences of black women are analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates the disciplines of macro- and

Women, AIDS & Activism


The ACT UP/NY Women & AIDS Book Group - 1991
    A thorough analysis of AIDS issues for women.

Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory


Joan M. Gero - 1991
    In it, leading archaeologists from around the world contribute original analyses of prehistoric data to discover how gender systems operated in the past.

Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality


Lynda Marie Zwinger - 1991
    Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel is a provocative study of the father-daughter story—a neglected dimension of the family romance.  It has important implications for the history of the novel, for our understanding of key texts in that history, and for theories concerning the representation of gender, family relations, and heterosexuality in Western culture.    In the English and American novel, argues Lynda Zwinger, “the good woman”  .  .  .  is a father’s daughter,  .  .  .  constructed to the very particular specifications of an omnipresent and unvoiced paternal desire.”  Zwinger supports her case with an analysis of both “high-brow” and “low-brow” novels and with ingenious textual analyses of five novels:  Clarissa Harlowe, Dombey and Son, Little Women, The Golden Bowl, and The Story of O.    In the dominant discourse of Anglo-American culture, the father’s daughter provides the cornerstone for the patriarchal edifice of domesticity and the alibi for patriarchal desire.  Zwinger’s analysis of the sexual politics embodied in the figure of this sentimental daughter raises compelling critical and cultural issues.  Zwinger shows how different readings of Clarissa’s story form a sentimental composite that  makes her available in perpetuity to heterosexual desire.  Dombey and Son  illuminates the erotic dimension of the sentimental, the titillation always inherent in the spectacle of virtue in distress.  Zwinger’s analysis of Little Women  in the context of Louisa May Alcott’s own life-text focuses upon the problems of a daughter trying to write the filial romance.  The Golden Bowl deploys the daughter of sentiment as a “cover story” for a feminine version of the Oedipal story, founded on the daughter who can’t say yes, but doesn’t say no.  The Story of O reveals the pornographic dimension in romantic and sentimental love.    In her conclusion, Zwinger offers an overview of the nineteenth-century novel, asking what difference it makes when the writer is a daughter.  She shows how the daughter’s family romance pictures the father as inadequate, ironically requiring the sentimental daughter as a patriarchal prop.  She develops a useful concept of hysteria and argues that generic “disorder” and hysterical “intrusions” mark the family romance novels of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.  And finally, she makes the case that the daughter’s choice to stay home is not necessarily an act of simple complicity,  for by staying home she comes as close as she can to disrupting the father-daughter romance.

Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture


Fang-Fu Juan - 1991
    Some of the earliest surviving literature of China is devoted to discussions of sexual topics, and the sexual implications of the Ym and Yang theories common in ancient China continue to influence Tantric and esoteric sexual practices today far dis- tant from their Chinese origins. In recent years, a number of books have been written exploring the history of sexual practices and ideas in China, but most have ended the discussion with ancient China and have not continued up to the present time. Fang Fu Ruan first surveys the ancient assumptions and beliefs, then carries the story to present-day China with brief descriptions of homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestism, transsexualism, and prostitution, and ends with a chapter on changing attitudes toward sex in China today. Dr. Ruan is well qualified to give such an overview. Until he left China in the 1980s, he was a leader in attempting to change the repressive attitudes of the government toward human sexuality. He wrote a best- selling book on sex in China, and had written to and corresponded with a number of people in China who considered him as confidant and ad- visor about their sex problems. A physician and medical historian, Dr. Ruan's doctoral dissertation was a study of the history of sex in China.

Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law


Drucilla Cornell - 1991
    In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. In response to these movements, Beyond Accommodation strives to broaden the scope of feminist theory by articulating a platform, under the concept of relative universalism, which proposes the idea that women are not a unified and homogenous group although they are positioned as women in patriarchy. Cornell's theory allows for differences in women's situations without giving up on the idea that women are fighting a common phenomenon called patriarchy.

Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925


Mariana Valverde - 1991
    Their targets for moral reform were various: sex hygiene, immigration policy, slum clearance, prostitution, and "white slavery."Mariana Valverde's groundbreaking The Age of Light, Soap, and Waterexamines the work and the ideas of moralist clergy, social workers, politicians, and bureaucrats who sought to maintain - or create - a white Protestant Canada. The morality idealized by evangelical, feminist, and medical activists was not, as is often assumed, completely repressive and puritanical. On the contrary, the self-defined social purity movement at the centre of this book talked endlessly about sex in order to create a healthy sexuality among both native-born and immigrant Canadians. Sexual health was linked to racial purity, and both of these were in turn linked to efforts to abolish urban slums by means of symbolic as well as physical "light, soap, and water."This study uncovers a little known dimension of Canadian social history and shows that moral reform was not the project of a marginal puritanical group but was central to the race, class, and gender organization of modern English Canada.

Feminism Confronts Technology


Judy Wajcman - 1991
    Wajcman argues that the identification between men and machines is not immutable but is the result of ideological and cultural processes. She surveys sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed.Over the last two decades feminists have identified men's monopoly on technology as an important source of their power, women's lack of technological skills as an important element in their dependence on men. During this period, women's efforts to control their fertility have extended from abortion and contraception to mobilizing around the new reproductive technologies. At the same time there has been a proliferation of new technologies in the home and in the workplace. The political struggles emerging around reproductive technology, as well as the technologies affecting domestic work, paid labor, and the built environment, are the focus of this book.

Female and Male in Borneo


Vinson H. Sutlive - 1991
    Monograph Series, Volume No. One The papers in this book describe human sexuality and gender among a small sample of societies on the island of Borneo. Expressions of human sexuality vary widely among the 200 autonymic societies, which range in population from a few hundred persons to three-quarters of a million. Some are quite open about the subject, others circumspect and discreet. The present work contains studies of eight societies, with references to others. It does not deal with Chinese and Malays, who with others will be the subjects of future monographs on the same topic.