Today, the book is considered a classic in African American and feminist circles.In Sisters of the Yam, hooks examines how the emotional health of black women is wounded by daily assaults of racism and sexism. Exploring such central life issues as work, beauty, trauma, addiction, eroticism and estrangement from nature, hooks shares numerous strategies for self-recovery and healing. She also shows how black women can empower themselves and effectively struggle against racism, sexism and consumer capitalism.As hooks’ first book on psychological concerns, Sisters of the Yam paved the way for her more recent and popular writing on love, relationships and community. This South End Press Classics Edition will include a new introduction.Praise for Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery:“By confronting topics avoided in polite company—including progressive black folks—hooks helps us tackle our deepest fears, those we harbor about our self-worth as African Americans, and get on with the business of becoming.”—Village Voice Literary Supplement“hooks continues to produce some of the most challenging, insightful, and provocative writing on race and gender in the United States today.”—Library Journal“[bell hooks] draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than . . . most other writers.”—Publishers Weekly

    This groundbreaking work seeks nothing less than fundamental cultural change: the transformation of basic attitudes about power, gender, race, and sexuality.The editors thoroughly reviewed the book for this new edition, selecting eight new essays that address topics such as rape as war crime, sports and sexual violence, sexual abuse among the clergy, conflict between traditional mores and women's rights in the Asian American and Latin American communities, as well insightful analyses of cyberporn.The diverse contributors are activists, opinion leaders, theologians, policymakers, educators, and authors of both genders. An excellent text for undergraduate classes in Women's Studies, Family Sociology or Criminal Justice, the book is being reissued on the 10th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

    Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen's Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather.

    From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body—weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more—in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape—finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"—Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001)

    Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing.The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

    This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.

    The Creation of Patriarchy, the first book in her two-volume magnum opus Women and History (1986) received wide review attention and much acclaim, winning the prestigious Joan Kelly Prize of the American Historical Association for the best work on Women's History that year. Ms hailed the book for providing a grand historical framework that was impossible even to imagine before the enlightenment about women's place in the world provided by her earlier work and that of other feminist scholars. New Directions for Women said it may well be the most important work in feminist theory to appear in our generation. Patriarchy traced the development of the ideas, symbols, and metaphors by which men institutionalized their domination of women. Now, in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the eagerly awaited concluding volume of Women and History, Lerner documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, to create Women's History, and to achieve a feminist consciousness. In a richly documented narrative filled with inspiring portraits of women, Lerner ranges from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, tracing several important ways by which women strove for autonomy and equality. One of the most remarkable sections examines over twelve hundred years of feminist Bible criticism. Since objections to women's thinking, teaching, and speaking in public were based on biblical authority--most notably, passages from Genesis and the writings of St. Paul--women returned again and again to these texts, in an attempt to subvert patriarchal dominance and establish their equality with men. This survey of biblical criticism allows Lerner to illustrate her most important insight--the discontinuity of women's history. She describes how women's history was not passed on from generation to generation, forcing women in effect to reinvent the wheel over and over again. In a series of fascinating portraits of individual women who resisted patriarchal indoctrination, Lerner discusses women mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and later Protestant mystics, and brings to life the many women of great literary talent, from Christine de Pisan to Louise Labe to Emily Dickinson, who simply bypassed patriarchal thought and created alternate worlds for themselves. Documenting the 1,200 year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, create a women's history, and achieve a feminist consciousness, this brilliant work charts new ground for feminist theory, the history of ideas, and the development of women's place in our intellectual tradition.

    I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." — Alphonso Lingis"This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." — Judith ButlerVolatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems.Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women — menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists.

    I remember thinking, At nineteen, this linoleum is the last thing I'm ever going to see, because I'm dying." Marilyn: "Let me tell you about my pretty, wonderful, talented mother. She died from an illegal abortion when she was thirty-four and I was six." Bruce: "I really don't remember much about the first illegal abortion I did, because I was drunk when I did it." Coroner Fred: "The dead women we saw had either bled to death or they had died from overwhelming infections. Most of them were in their teens or twenties. I don't recall too many older than that. The deaths stopped overnight in 1973." All the oceans of verbiage and tons of newsprint on the subject of abortion boil down to one simple question. That question is not whether we will have abortions but what kind of abortions we will have. It is a question framed in stark human terms in Patricia Miller's The Worst of Times, which introduces us to dozens of ordinary Americans who have had firsthand experience with illegal abortion: women who survived the pain, humiliation, shame, and terror; motherless children of women who died; doctors who treated the terrible consequences of botched abortions; the abortionists themselves - barbers, midwives, mechanics; and the cops, coroners, and DAs charged with upholding the law. Abortion is a complex issue, but it is not an issue that exists abstractly in the eyes of ethicists or theologians. It is an issue that exists in the flesh - in the flesh of women with complicated lives and large responsibilities and a whole web of personal, familial, and moral concerns. As The Worst of Times makes powerfully and painfully clear, it is a question that women must be allowed to answer for themselves.

    In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women.

    Featuring essays by such prominent scholars as Judith Butler, John D'Emilio, Kobena Mercer, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader explores a multitude of sexual, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic experiences.Ranging across disciplines including history, literature, critical theory, cultural studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology, classics, and philosophy, this anthology traces the inscription of sexual meanings in all forms of cultural expression. Representing the best and most significant English language work in the field, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader addresses topics such as butch-fem roles, the cultural construction of gender, lesbian separatism, feminist theory, AIDS, safe-sex education, colonialism, S/M, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, children's books, black nationalism, popular films, Susan Sontag, the closet, homophobia, Freud, Sappho, the media, the hijras of India, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the politics of representation. It also contains an extensive bibliographical essay which will provide readers with an invaluable guide to further reading.Contributors: Henry Abelove, Tomas Almaguer, Ana Maria Alonso, Michele Barale, Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case, Danae Clark, Douglas Crimp, Teresa de Lauretis, John D'Emilio, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Marilyn Frye, Charlotte Furth, Marjorie Garber, Stuart Hall, David Halperin, Phillip Brian Harper, Gloria T. Hull, Maria Teresa Koreck, Audre Lorde, Biddy Martin, Deborah E. McDowell, Kobena Mercer, Richard Meyer, D. A. Miller, Serena Nanda, Esther Newton, Cindy Patton, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Joan W. Scott, Daniel L. Selden, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Smith, Catharine R. Stimpson, Sasha Torres, Martha Vicinus, Simon Watney, Harriet Whitehead, John J. Winkler, Monique Wittig, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

    Yalom focuses on the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; and others bound together by a common nightmare.

    and to understand that when we throw away that rule book we are not alone."--Ms.¶"A wonderful trove of experimentation and possibility."--The Women's Review of Books¶"This book is a homecoming!"--Philadelphia Daily News

    All readers can learn from this book—about how ignorance can lead to bigotry and prejudice, about how moral certitude can be painfully oppressive, about how knowledge and reflection can give birth to empathy, and how understanding differences among each other can be both challenging and rewarding.” – from the Foreword by Allan Bernardo, Ph.D., Director of La Sallean Institute for Development and Educational Research, De La Salle University

    Merry Wiesner has updated and expanded her prize-winning study; she has added new sections on topics such as sexuality, masculinity, the impact of colonialism, and women's role as consumers. Other themes investigated include the female life cycle, literacy, women's economic role, artistic creation, female piety--and witchcraft--and the relationship between gender and power. Accessible, engrossing, and lively, this book will be of central importance for those interested in gender history, early modern Europe, and comparative history.

    Written in response to the needs and concerns of contemporary man, a Jungian psychoanalyst reveals how men can channel their libidinal energies without becoming possessed or overwhelmed by them. Photos.

    Readers are invited to use their capacities for thoughtful self-reflection to access the Trickster for fuller, more generative lives. Photographs.

    This book is a documentation of the female spiritual elders of these tribes who have been entrusted with handing down the tribal wisdom through the generations.

    The editors are excellent, well-known scholars, and activists in the academy." --Darlene Clark Hine"After looking carefully at Traps' selections, I have to confess that I'm both excited and satisfied by what Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall have assembled here from the 19th century to the present. Educators genuinely need a text like this for opening their classroom to critical discussions on the well-worn subjects of race and gender."--Charles JohnsonTraps is the first anthology of writings by 19th- and 20th-century African American men on the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The selections on gender in Sections I and II reveal what some may view as the unexpected commitment of African American men to feminism. Included here are critiques of the subordinate social, economic, and political position of black women. Sections III and IV analyze the taboos and myths in which black sexuality is enmeshed. These essays also stress the importance of rejecting homophobia and the need to contest the predominance of a heterosexual paradigm. Monolithic constructions of gender and sexuality, reinforced by sexism and historically sanctioned homophobia, are the "traps" that give this book its focus and its title.

    These classic stories portray that part of the male psyche that is normally buried under conventional male roles, heroic ideals, and patriarchal ambitions, breaking dramatically with traditional masculine values and typical stereotypes.

    With a heady command of language and the ability to work in a variety of forms, she continues her thematic explorations of love objects and death subjects.

    The Writings of Christine de Pizan offers lengthy excerpts of nearly all of Christine’s works, in authoritative and gracious translations. Among the writings are Christine’s autobiography; lyric and allegorical poetry; the official biography of King Charles V; writings on women, warfare, politics, love, and the human condition; writings from the famous Quarrel of the Rose; The Book of the City of Ladies; The Treasury of the City of Ladies; The Book of the Duke of True Lovers; and Christine’s triumphant poem on Joan of Arc. Edited and with an introduction by the foremost authority on Christine’s work, Charity Cannon Willard, who sets the writings in historical, biographical, and literary context.

    

    These essays represent key issues in feminist theology and the feminist religious movement—milestones in the attempts of Christian feminists to reclain their spiritual authority, define biblical religion and the Christian church, and to articulate a feminist religious vision of justice and liberation.

    [T]his book's analysis lends support to claims that the gender system affected our very conceptions of science." --Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences"An important book for the educated general public as well as for scholars in many disciplines. Highly recommended." --Library Journal"Students and researchers alike will welcome this carefully argued volume that so clearly traces the dominant contours of Western conceptions about women." --Isis"Nancy Tuana's book is brillant. In under two hundred pages she presents a concise account of how women have been perceived in relation to men in the Western world for the past 2,500 years." --American Historical Review"A wide-ranging discussion of conceptions of women in science, philosophy and religion from ancient times to the late nineteenth century, Tuana's book makes it devastatingly clear how powerful and how deeply rooted was the Western idea of women as men's inferiors." --Women's Review of Books..". an unusually readable account of the image of women from the Greeks to the nineteenth century, wedded to a highly interesting argument about the way religion and philosophy affect the direction of the work of scientists, and how the work of scientists is used by philosophers and clergy to give authority to the more abstract world of ideas." --Magill Book ReviewsProvides a framework for understanding the persistence of the Western patriarchal view of woman as inferior. Tuana examines beliefs that were accepted a priori as evidence of women's inferiority and studies early theories of woman's nature to illustrate the way scientific literature, was influenced by--and in turn affected--religious and philosophical tenets.

    A guide for building relationships between mother and daughter offers ideas for overcoming common crises that result in loss of self-esteem for adolescent girls.

    

    From an eight-year-old who successfully challenged two young harassers on the playground to an organized group of fifty women who confronted a dockworker in response to an attempted rape on the job, here's what they did, how they did it -- and how you can do it, too.Back Off! is the first book to focus on the direct-action tactics that work and the first to deal with harassment everywhere it takes place, in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, at school, on the street, on the bus or subway, in the park, even in church.Back Off! examines the dynamics of sex and power in sexual harassment, the motives behind harassers' actions, and why traditional responses such as appeasement or aggression don't work, and describes the successful resistance strategies that you really can use -- including nonviolent personal confrontation techniques, group confrontations, administrative remedies, and formal lawsuits.

    It does this in a collection of feminist articles, including testimonies by victims/survivors of pornography that together make a convincing case for the view that pornography (as distinct from erotica) causes harm to women, including acts of violence. The volume is organized into four parts, the first of which provides vivid and moving personal accounts of how women's lives have been damaged by pornography. Part two gives an overview of the present status of pornography in our society, as well as the raging debate over pornography and censorship. Part three details several interesting and significant studies on the effects of pornography, as well as critiques of some of the most influential non-feminist researchers. The concluding part then describes actions, both humorous and grave, that feminists have employed in their fight against pornography. Some of the contributors are: Andrea Dworkin, Patricia Hill Collins, Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem and John Stoltenberg. "Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography" will appeal to students and lecturers of women's studies and sociology, political activists, public officials, social scientists, legal and medical professionals - those who consider pornography free speech, and those who of it as obscene, and those who consider it a form of discrimination against women. Women's studies teachers should find it a welcome addition to their required reading lists, and those working against sexual violence may appreciate it as a primary, up-to-date, and comprehensive source and inspiration.

    His close reading of the individual texts leads to illuminating intertextual parallels, drawn through an archetypal perspective, which creates coherence among the many recurring image-patterns and motifs.The haunting is an incursion into the male ego's dominion: the female demon is seen as a usurper or intruder; she inhabits and insidiously attempts to exert her influence, to feminize the male. These demands include the impelling need to acknowledge male femininity, or androgyny. Ignoring this drive, which Andriano views as instinctual and archetypal, often results in what the Romantics called nympholepsy, and what Carl Jung called anima-possession.Although the notion that men need to acknowledge their own femininity is not new, the realization that doing so involves coming to terms not only with Eros (in its widest sense) but also with Thanatos has never been sufficiently emphasized, except perhaps by the post-Jungian James Hillman, by whose work Andriano is especially influenced. This book clearly and succinctly demonstrates that fear of the inner feminine prevents a man from ever fully maturing; his anima remains that of a child (he can only view women as girls or mothers), and he never comes to know, much less to love, the dark side of his soul, his own lady of darkness.

    Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most challenging voices in musicology today on a question of importance to all the humanistic disciplines.

    In this volume, leading anthropologists reflect on the evidence and theories, broadening the conventional field of comparison to include female/male relationships among nonhuman primates and introducing fresh case studies that range from lemurs to hominids, from Japanese peasants to male strippers in Florida, from skeletal remains of a Korean queen to mother/child conversations in Samoa. They document the rich and often surprising diversity in sex and gender hierarchies among both human and nonhuman primates.

    Gender in medieval monasticism influenced landscape contexts and strategies of economic management, the form and development of buildings and their symbolic and iconographic content. Women's religious experience was often poorly documented, but their archaeology indicates a shared tradition which was closely linked with, and valued by local communities. The distinctive patterns observed suggest that gender is essential to archaeological analysis.

    The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.

    This is perhaps the first time that a Native elder has presented a detailed and comprehensive explanation of rock-art images from her people’s culture. As Annie York’s narratives unfold, we are taken back to the fresh wonder of childhood, as well as to a time in human society when people and animals lived together in one psychic dimension.This book describes, among many other things, the solitary spiritual meditations of young people in the mountains, once considered essential education. Astrological predictions, herbal medicine, winter spirit dancing, hunting, shamanism, respect for nature, midwifery, birth and death, are some of the topics that emerge from Annie’s reading of the trail signs and other cultural symbols painted on the rocks. She firmly believed that this knowledge should be published so that the general public could understand why, as she put it, “The Old People reverenced those sacred places like that Stein.”They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever opens a discussion of some of the issues in rock-art research that relate to “notating” and “writing” on the landscape, around the world and through the millennia. This landmark publication presents a well-reasoned hypothesis to explain the evolution of symbolic or iconic writing from sign language, trail signs and from the geometric and iconic imagery of the dreams and visions of shamans and neophyte hunters. This book suggests that the resultant images, written or painted on stone, constitute a Protoliteracy which has assisted both the conceptualization and communication of hunting peoples’ histories, philosophies, morals and ways life, and prepared the human mind for the economic, sociological and intellectual developments, including alphabetic written language.

    Discover the struggles and the triumphs of the women whose books have shaped so many lives. Dorothy Allison, Minnie Bruce Platt Leslea Newman, Lee Lynch, Joan Nestle, Katherine V.

    Written by two eminent scholars in the field, the book has comprehensive coverage of classic and modern research.

    A Simon & Schuster eBook

    But even in peacetime, the exploitation of women by military forces continues. Rarely mentioned in the press or in political debate are the hundreds of thousands of Asian women living around US military bases and working in economies built on the sale of sex.

    When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature’s Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right.

    This new, updated edition of the bestselling text retains all the strengths of the first edition whilst: providing a critical survey of the field that is unrivalled in its accuracy and clarity; demonstrating how developments in diet, sexuality, reproductive technology, genetic engineering and sports science have made the body a site for social alternatives and individual choices; and elucidating the practical uses of theory in striking and accessible ways.

    For anyone struggling with how far we should go in using inclusive language, this is "must" reading." Tony Campolo, Eastern College"With tender power and wit, Paul Smith challenges the church to biblical fidelity and justice in its worship language. How encouraging it is to hear an evangelical male voice affirm the necessity of feminine images of God! This outstanding book so clearly and convincingly demonstrates the biblical imperative for inclusive God-language that the Christian community can no longer ignore it."" Jann Aldredge-Clanton, Ph.D., Chaplain, Baylor University Medical Center, Author of "God and Gender" and "God: A Word for Girls and Boys