80 photos & drawings.

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

    Enduring cruel poverty, Phoolan Devi survived the humiliation of an abusive marriage, the savage killing of her bandit-lover, and horrifying gang rape to claim retribution for herself and all low-caste women of the Indian plains. In a three-year campaign that rocked the government, she delivered justice to rape victims and stole from the rich to give to the poor, before negotiating surrender on her own terms. Throughout her years of imprisonment without trial, Phoolan Devi remained a beacon of hope for the poor and the downtrodden. In 1996, amidst both popular support and media controversy, she was elected to the Parliament. On July 25, 2001, Phoolan Devi was shot dead in Delhi. The identity of her killers is unknown, but it is thought that they may include relatives of villagers killed by her gang nearly twenty years ago. For over a decade millions have found the power and scope of Phoolan Devi's myth irresistible. Here is the story of her life through her eyes and in her own voice.

    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. "

    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.

    Frances Driscoll's RAPE POEMS sink into the horror and beauty of memory without attention to pretense. The poems refuse to relent from the poet's sense of unshakable reality and do not belabor themselves with the trivialities of a misunderstanding world. Described as a compelling...rare collection, THE RAPE POEMS is personal reportage in common language with alarmingly precise composition and artistry. Harrowing and obsessively skeptical, tender and private and hugely humane, these unsettling poems arrive like dispatches from the very source of our wounds --Ralph Angel.

    Dr. Sandra Bloom interweaves the individual and the social, the personal and the political, with the story of how she and a group of friends and colleagues created a traditional psychiatric milieu based on social psychiatry principles. Bloom and her colleagues have come to believe that unresolved, multi-generational, often forgotten trauma leads to a compulsion to repeat that is a powerful force in individual and social history. Because of this unresolved legacy of trauma, all of our social systems are "trauma-organized," producing institutions which are unresponsive to and often directly counter to human needs.Creating Sanctuary presents the thesis that effective social reconstruction is only effective if we understand the biological, psychological, social, and moral legacy of trauma.

    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.

    Matsuda offers a strikingly insightful look at how our collective experiences of race, class, and gender inform our understanding of law and shape our vision of a more just society.

    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

    From Simon & Schuster, Life and Death by Andrea Dworkin is the unapologetic writing on the continuing war against women.In this important work, Dworken gathers essays published between 1987 and 1995, in which she comments on society's ongoing and tacit approval of aggression against women that often ends in these women losing their lives.

    Combining examples with activities and selected readings it offers a unique resource for teachers and students in cultural studies and related fields as an introduction to this complex and central theme.

    Drawing heavily from interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, describes service in the Navy, Marines, Signal Corp, Red Cross, Salvation Army, YMCA; and as Army Nurses, reconstruc

    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.

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

    With reference to contemporary and historical issues in biomedicine, the book argues that the boundaries of both the subject and the body are no longer secure. The aim is both to valorise women and to suggest that 'leakiness' may be the very ground for a postmodern feminist ethic. The contribution made by Leaky Bodies and Boundaries is to go beyond modernist feminisms to radically displace the mechanisms by which women are devalued. The anxiety that postmodernism cannot yield an ethics, nor advance feminist concerns is addressed. This book will provide invaluable reading for those studying feminist philosophy, cultural studies and sociology.

    They reveal decisions they made, and the feelings they had - from satisfaction to abuse. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the author conducted a survey of black female sexuality. The findings are presented here. They reveal the role of historical stereotypes in contemporary relationships and images. The book also offers compassionate strategies for confronting and overcoming these myths and finding greater sexual health and well-being.

    Coauthor of civil rights antipornography laws, life-long political activist, and international lecturer and consultant on issues of sexual violence and exploitation, Dworkin has a prolific and distinguished writing career. She has published thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, and her work has been translated into twelve languages.This is the first-ever book-length analysis of Dworkin's feminist politics and the first critical analysis to examine her controversial political ideas in light of the literary dimensions of her prose. Cindy Jenefsky, with Ann Russo, looks at Dworkin's major nonfiction works—including Woman Hating, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and Intercourse —in terms of the rhetorical dynamics animating her political ideas. Also included within this analysis are Jenefsky's lengthy interviews with Dworkin, which focus on her identity as an artist and on the artistic principles guiding her work.The result is a novel reinterpretation of Dworkin's politics and a brilliantly clear analysis of the political nature of artistic practice for readers interested in literary and rhetorical criticism, feminist theory and activism, the volatile debates over pornography and civil rights, and the relationship between contemporary sexual practices and male power systems.

    By providing the first book to engage in an empirical investigation of the pornography industry itself, the authors--each grounded in the radical feminist anti-pornography movement--move beyond the rhetorical bomb-tossing of an often polarized debate.The authors engage in a systematic examination of the politics, production, content, and consumption of contemporary mass-market heterosexual pornography, thereby contributing to a fuller understanding of pornography's role in the cultural construction of gender, racial and sexual identities, and relations. They begin with an overview of the social and political history of the feminist anti-pornography movement and the debate over pornography within feminism. Then they address the various rhetorical dodges--definitional, legal, and causal--used to distort the fact that institutionalized pornography helps maintain the sexual and social oppression of women within a patriarchal system.Exploring the beginnings of the commercial pornography industry, the book focuses in part on the history of Playboy magazine. It also analyzes the content of contemporary mass-market videos. Dines, Jensen, and Russo argue that the sexual ideology of patriarchy eroticizes domination and submission, with pornography playing a significant role in how these values are mediated and normalized in American society. They discuss the effects of pornography on the lives of those who use it and those against whom it is used. In so doing, the authors hope to contribute to creating a world in which sex is not a site of oppression but of liberation.

    Vera Mackie surveys the development of socialist women's activism in Japan from the 1900s to the 1930s, in the broader context of the industrial and political development of modern Japan. She outlines the major socialist womens' organizations and their debates with their liberal and anarchist sisters. The book also offers close analyses of the political and creative writings of socialist women.

    Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.

    In Eve's Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed "secret knowledge" to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as "witchcraft" in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by "Eve's herbs" has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

    Using a full palette including survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author delineates the “dialectics of domination and resistance in the maquilas,” and develops a telling critique of labor-process theory—a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras. Writing with grace, passion, and scholarly rigor, Devon Peña first locates the maquila industry within the history of workplace organizations. He then examines border workplace and community struggles from the perspectives of the women who work in the maquiladoras—devoting ample space to the workers’ own narratives. He describes the workers’ struggles for democracy and social justice in the workplace, and for sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from factory to community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s. No earlier book has so closely examined the struggles of female maquila workers. These women have typically been portrayed as passive, apolitical, and easily exploited. Peña, however, presents an opposing view by illuminating the intricate subaltern life of the shop floor: the workers’ informal and often invisible methods of resistance to hazardous conditions, sexual harassment, and managerial tyranny. The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant, vivid analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization, and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternative modes of development that are ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate.

    From the St. Louis apartment where Tennessee Williams grew up to the hangouts of the blues queens of the '20s and '30s, this gem brings gay people, places and events together in a refreshing way that makes the past come alive with great spirit. 15 photos.

    Social, legal and public policy settings are used to comprehensively explore this theme.

    Most of their heroics and deeds have largely gone unreported, even though many have been killed in the line of duty, died of diseases or accidents, or suffered as prisoners of war. DEGREESL DEGREESL Focusing on human drama, this riveting book tells vividly of women's achievements in uniform going back to World War I. It also relates in compelling style the heated controversy over sending women into combat, a dispute that contributed to the suicide of Admiral Jeremy Boorda in 1996.The Gulf War of 1991 saw 37,000 women serve in uniform who, like their predecessors, performed admirably and demonstrated courage under fire. This war and the subsequent Tailhook scandal renewed the call by feminist groups and their supporters in Congress to have the military remove, once and for all, the restrictions barring women from direct combat. While some saw this struggle as a quest for equality and opportunity in uniform, others fought just as vigorously to keep women out of combat. The 1990s saw women assigned to ships, to aircraft, and to jobs previously denied them due to an easing of the long-standing combat restrictions. This resulted in a nationwide debate which, many allege, contributed to the suicide of Admiral Jeremy Boorda in 1996. DEGREESL DEGREESL Allowing women to serve in the military during wartime has been a subject of controversy since World War I, when, for the first time in history, thousands answered the same patriotic call to duty as the men and volunteered. Unlike the men, however, these pioneers were targets of gossip and branded as camp followers by some. Since that time, some 3.5 million American women have served their country as spies, nurses, guerrillas, or war correspondents. Many of these volunteers were wounded or died in the line of duty, others suffered as prisoners of warOCoall with little or no recognition.During World War II, the military actively recruited women to fill support roles in an effort to free more able-bodied men for combat duty. This resulted in the creation of women's branches of the armed services, which enabled women to take on even greater challenges and more diversified roles than previously allowed. These new organizations included: DEGREESL WAACsOColater WACs (Army) DEGREESL WAVEs (Navy) DEGREESL SPARs (Coast Guard) DEGREESL Marine Corps Women's Reserve DEGREESL WASPs (ferrying airplanes) DEGREESL These groups attracted more than 350,000 volunteers. The tradition of volunteering continued on through conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and each time, American women met their challenges with honor and distinction. DEGREESL DEGREESL DEGREESIWar and American Women DEGREESR brings to life the compelling story of the ordinary and extraordinary women who served their country in times of war. Their largely unreported and unacknowledged acts of heroism are vividly recounted by

    He shows how our two dramatically different experiences of life, one in the womb and one in the world, radically influence our sense of who we are. Dr Janus demonstrates the meaning of many folk stories from different cultures that tell of the effect of the mother's emotional experience on her unborn child, and gives a new understanding to the idea that humans have always possessed the concept of the present world and of a world beyond. With numerous examples, Dr Janus illustrates the lifelong effects of premature and difficult birth experiences and their relationship to psychological problems such as phobias and depression. This book shows how prenatal psychology offers us a new way to understand ourselves, our culture and our relationship to the world.

    This study demonstrates that there is such a thing as feminist realism; that this style empowers women; and that it is a vehicle of their interconnectedness beyond cultural specificities.