Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s (or as a political icon for militant activism) she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis.The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - Prisons, Repression, and Resistance, Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism, Aesthetics and Culture, and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism.Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies.

    In this brilliant exploration of the apparent conflicts and tensions between feminism and contemplative spirituality, Carol Lee Flinders uncovers how a life of meaning, self-knowledge, and freedom depends on both.In 'At the Root of This Longing'

    Beginning with the First Mother in sub-Saharan Africa more than 200,000 years ago, Aurora Levins Morales takes readers on a journey through time and around the globe.We learn of Juana de Asbaje, author of the "Reply to Sor Filotea" in 1693, the first feminist essay written in the New World; Gracia Nasi, Constantinople's "Queen of the Jews"; the African-American activist and warrior of words Ida B. Wells; and the unlikely martyr and symbol, Ethel Rosenberg.Levins Morales weaves in her own story of pain and healing, ameliorated by the restorative power of memory, and bears witness to a larger history of resistance and abuse by women and men.This historical memoir revives our connection to the forgotten lore of our grandmothers, featuring explanations of the medicinal properties of herbs and and foods such as rosemary, ginkgo, and banana. With love, joy, and defiance, Levins Morales offers Remedios as testimony to those barely recorded or known to history, the women who shaped our world.Aurora Levins Morales is author of Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (South End Press, 1998) and Getting Home Alive (Firebrand, 1986). A Jewish "red diaper baby" from the mountains of Puerto Rico, Morales writes lucidly about the complexities of social identity. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.[box]Also available from South End PressMedicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of IntegrityTC $14.00, 0-89608-581-3 o CUSADeColores Means All of UsTP $18.00, 0-89608-583-X o CUSALoving in the War YearsTP $17.00, 0-89608-626-7 o CUSA

    Drawing on their individual narratives, it explores international struggles to uphold the rights of this often marginalized group.

    Alice Dreger focuses on events in France and Britain in the late nineteenth century, a moment of great tension for questions of sex roles. While feminists, homosexuals, and anthropological explorers openly questioned the natures and purposes of the two sexes, anatomical hermaphrodites suggested a deeper question: just how many human sexes are there? Ultimately hermaphrodites led doctors and scientists to another surprisingly difficult question: what is sex, really?Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex takes us inside the doctors' chambers to see how and why medical and scientific men constructed sex, gender, and sexuality as they did, and especially how the material conformation of hermaphroditic bodies--when combined with social exigencies--forced peculiar constructions. Throughout the book Dreger indicates how this history can help us to understand present-day conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality. This leads to an epilogue, where the author discusses and questions the protocols employed today in the treatment of intersexuals (people born hermaphroditic). Given the history she has recounted, should these protocols be reconsidered and revised?A meticulously researched account of a fascinating problem in the history of medicine, this book will compel the attention of historians, physicians, medical ethicists, intersexuals themselves, and anyone interested in the meanings and foundations of sexual identity.

    Wood explores the relationships between narrative form and style and sexual politics, probing the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race and gender in films from the United States, Europe, and Japan.

    In Trans Liberation, Feinberg has gathered a collection of hir speeches on trans liberation and its essential connection to the liberation of all people. This wonderfully immediate, impassioned, and stirring book is for anyone who cares about civil rights and creating a just and equitable society.

    Wells to Anita Hill. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, Deborah Gray White also movingly illuminates black women's painful struggle to hold their racial and gender identities intact while feeling the inexorable pull of the agendas of white women and black men. Finally, it tells the larger and lamentable story of how Americans began this century measuring racial progress by the status of black women but gradually came to focus on the status of black men-the masculinization of America's racial consciousness. Writing with the same magisterial eye for historical detail as in her best-selling Ar'n't I a Woman, Deborah Gray White has given us a moving and definitive history of struggle and freedom. "Splendid . . . a broad and sweeping history that becomes an intensely personal experience for the reader. . . . An inspiring showcase of scholarship and sistership." - Nell Irvin Painter, Raleigh News & Observer

    Selections are organized into five historical periods from the 18th century to the mid-1990s. The book includes key feminist manifestoes to help students see the link between feminist theory and application, as well as clear, concise explanations of 12 key concepts that characterize the development of feminist thought since its inception.

    

    How can women's full participation transform Jewish law, prayer, sexuality, and marriage? What does it mean to "engender" Jewish tradition? Pioneering theologian Rachel Adler gives this timely and powerful question its first thorough study in a book that bristles with humor, passion, intelligence, and deep knowledge of traditional biblical and rabbinic texts.

    It gathers a wide range of evidence from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D.--above all from such literary texts as courtroom speeches, love poetry, philosophy, epigram, and history, but also graffiti and other inscriptions as well as artistic artifacts--and uses that evidence to reconstruct the contexts within which Roman texts were created and had their meaning. The book takes as its starting point the thesis that in order to understand the Roman material, we must make the effort to set aside any preconceptions we might have regarding sexuality, masculinity, and effeminacy.Williams' book argues in detail that for the writers and readers of Roman texts, the important distinctions were drawn not between homosexual and heterosexual, but between free and slave, dominant and subordinate, masculin and effeminate as conceived in specifically Roman terms. Other important questions addressed by this book include the differences between Roman and Greek practices and ideologies; the influence exerted by distinctively Roman ideals of austerity; the ways in which deviations from the norms of masculine sexual practice were negotiated both in the arena of public discourse and in real men's lives; the relationship between the rhetoric of nature and representations of sexual practices; and the extent to which same-sex marriages were publicly accepted.

    These essays and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman's journey towards self-discovery and human understanding. As a widely respected cultural educator and analyst, Huggins offers an Aboriginal view of the history, values and struggles of Indigenous people. Sister Girl examines many topics, including community action, political commitment, the tradition and value or oral history, and government intervention in Aboriginal lives.

    Explores the historical perception of woman as the seductress whose influence undermines the power of the white male.

    While Partition sounds smooth on paper, the reality was horrific. More than eight million people migrated and one million died in the process. The forced migration, violence between Hindus and Muslims, and mass widowhood were unprecedented and well-documented. What was less obvious but equally real was that millions of people had to realign their identities, uncertain about who they thought they were. The rending of the social and emotional fabric that took place in 1947 is still far from mended.While there are plenty of official accounts of Partition, there are few social histories and no feminist histories. Borders and Boundaries changes that, providing first-hand accounts and memoirs, juxtaposed alongside official government accounts. The authors make women not only visible but central. They explore what country, nation, and religious identity meant for women, and they address the question of the nation-state and the gendering of citizenship. In the largest ever peace-time mass migration of people, violence against women became the norm. Thousands of women committed suicide or were done to death by their own kinsmen. Nearly 100,000 women were "abducted" during the migration. A young woman might have been separated from her family when a convoy was ambushed, abducted by people of another religion, forced to convert, and forced into marriage or cohabitation. After bearing a child, she would be offered the opportunity to return only if she left her child behind and if she could face shame in her natal community. These stories do not paint their subjects as victims. Theirs are the stories of battles over gender, the body, sexuality, and nationalism-stories of women fighting for identity.

    Wade (1973) and William L. Weaver v. Reproductive Health Service (which brought the issue before an anti-Wade court in 1989), Cynthia Gorney draws on 500 interviews, as well as previously unexplored archival material, to present an intimate look at the passions, commitment, and political savvy that propel individuals on both sides. She traces, in particular, the paths of a nurse who runs an abortion clinic in St. Louis, and a member of the right-to-life movement, who came face to face in the Supreme Court during the Weaver decision.

    In the early twentieth century, the mammy became immortalized as Aunt Jemima, the spokesperson for a line of ready-mixed breakfast products. Although Aunt Jemima has undergone many makeovers over the years, she apparently has not lost her commercial appeal; her face graces more than forty food products nationwide and she still resonates in some form for millions of Americans.In Slave in a Box, M.M. Manring addresses the vexing question of why the troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American culture. Manring traces the evolution of the mammy from her roots in the Old South slave reality and mythology, through reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." We learn how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South.The initial success of the Aunt Jemima brand, Manring reveals, was based on a variety of factors, from lingering attempts to reunite the country after the Civil War to marketing strategies around World War I. Her continued appeal in the late twentieth century is a more complex and disturbing phenomenon we may never fully understand. Manring suggests that by documenting Aunt Jemima's fascinating evolution, however, we can learn important lessons about our collective cultural identity.

    O. Wilson, Desmond Morris, and David Buss, What Women Want—What Men Want offers compelling new evidence about the real reasons behind men's and women's differing sexual psychologies and sheds new light on what men and women look for in a mate, the predicament of marriage in the modern world, the relation between sex and emotion, and many other hotly debated questions. Drawing upon 2000 questionnaires and 200 intimate interviews that show how our sexual psychologies affect everyday decisions, John Townsend argues against the prevailing ideologically correct belief that differences in sexual behavior are "culturally constructed." Townsend shows there are deep-seated desires inherited from our evolutionary past that guide our actions. In a fascinating series of experiments, men and women were asked to indicate preferences for potential mates based on their attractiveness and apparent economic status. Women overwhelmingly preferred expensively dressed men to more attractive but apparently less successful men, and men were clearly inclined to choose more attractive women regardless of their professional status. Townsend's studies also indicate that men are predisposed to value casual sex, whereas women cannot easily separate sexual relations from the need for emotional attachment and economic security. Indeed, wherever men possess sexual alternatives to marriage, and women possess economic alternatives, divorce rates will be high. In the concluding chapter, Townsend draws upon the advice of couples who have maintained their marriages over the years to suggest ways to survive our evolutionary predicament. Lucidly and accessibly written, What Women Want—What Men Want shows us why we are the way we are and brings new clarity to one of the most intractable debates of our time.

    These 32 writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in our time. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their rebellion? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such an unwomanly struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. These stories tell how the world we live in changed.With "The Feminist Memoir Project," these activists contribute to yet another movement project, the political work of memory.

    Now, Manahan is back looking at another taboo subject -- the presence of lesbians in the Girl Scouts.For years, the Girl Scouts, the largest voluntary organization of girls and women in the world, has sent a clear message to the lesbians in its ranks -- stay hidden. Although some lesbian girls and women have felt at home in the world of Girl Scouting, others have endured discrimination and hypocrisy. In spite of the fact that its mission is the empowerment of girls, the organization has devalued and disempowered many of its adult volunteers and professional staff, as well as its young members, because it subscribes to the larger society's entrenched fear of homosexuality.That gap between the Girl Scouts' professed values and actual practice can be painfully wide. Despite a policy of nondiscrimination, the organization that has launched so many young women into productive lives as activists, innovators and leaders practices de facto "don't ask, don't tell", similar to the present policy of the United States military -- a practice that ignores scouting's own core values and beliefs.On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience is the first book to explore the contributions lesbians have made to Girl Scouting, the impact scouting has had on lesbians, and some of the problems undermining this relationship.

    At a time when white elites were concerned with imperialist projects and civilizing missions, progressive white women developed an explicit racial ideology to promote their cause, defending patriarchy for "primitives" while calling for its elimination among the "civilized." By exploring how progressive white women at the turn of the century laid the intellectual groundwork for the feminist social movements that followed, Louise Michele Newman speaks directly to contemporary debates about the effect of race on current feminist scholarship.

    Deep Space and Sacred Time examines for the first time in book-length form the many ways Star Trek has served as a mythic reference point for American society--and suggests that an understanding of this might help us to see ourselves more clearly as a culture. Moreover, this thoughtful and thought-provoking work posits that Star Trek offers its audience a sense of hope and, in the setting of an orderly cosmos, the possibility for empowerment.

    Brody’s readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness. Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoe’s “A True-Born Englishman,” which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, whose mixed-race status reveals the “unseemly origins of English imperial power.” Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, “black” figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in the context of debates about the “new woman,” slavery, and fears of the monstrous degeneration of English gentleman. Impossible Purities concludes with a discussion of Bram Stoker’s novella, “The Lair of the White Worm,” which brings together the book’s concerns with changing racial representations on both sides of the Atlantic. This book will be of interest to scholars in Victorian studies, literary theory, African American studies, and cultural criticism.

    Infants' bodies are altered, and what was "ambiguous" is made "normal." Kessler's interviews with pediatric surgeons and endocrinologists reveal how the intersex condition is normalized for parents and she argues that the way in which intersexuality is managed by the medical and psychological professions displays our culture's beliefs about gender and genitals.Parents of intersexed children are rarely heard from, but in this book they provide another perspective on reasons for genital surgeries and the quality of medical and psychological management. Although physicians educate parents about how to think about their children's condition, Kessler learned from parents of intersexed children that some parents are able to accept atypical genitals. Based on analysis of the medical literature and interview with adults who had received treatment as interesexed children, Kessler proposes new approaches for physicians to use in talking with parents and children. She also evaluates the appearance of a politicized vanguard, many of who are promoting an intersexual identity, who seek to alter the way physicians respond to intersexuality.Kessler explores the possibilities and implications of suspending a commitment to two "natural" genders and addresses gender destabilization issues arising from intersexuality. She thus compels readers to re-think the meaning of gender, genitals, and sexuality.

    The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 2/e, brings together recent critical writings in this important field, covering such diverse topics as the sources of eating disorders, the nature of lesbianism, and the consequences of violence against women. With the exception of two classic articles, all pieces were published in the last decade, and one-quarter of the selections are new to the second edition. The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 2/e, begins by looking at how ideas about women's bodies become culturally accepted. As the writings in the first section demonstrate, this is a political process that can reflect, reinforce, or challenge the distribution of power between men and women. Subsequent sections look at how, once ideas about women's bodies become accepted, they can serve as powerful--and political--tools for controlling women's appearance, sexuality, and behavior. Articles new to this edition include Daring to Desire: Culture and the Bodies of Adolescent Girls, by Deborah L. Tolman; Casing My Joints: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis, by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner; and Holding Back: Negotiating a Glass Ceiling on Women's Muscular Strength, by Shari L. Dworkin. This unique interdisciplinary anthology is ideal for undergraduate courses that cover the body and sexuality. It is also appropriate for introductory courses in women's studies and courses in the psychology, anthropology, or sociology of women; women and health; and feminist theory.

    

    The question of gender difference and whether it is natural or culturally constructed is a compelling one. The articles here, which draw on evidence from a wide range of geographic areas, demonstrate how all archaeological investigation can benefit from an awareness of issues of gender. They also show how the long-term nature of archaeological research can inform the gender debate across the disciplines. The volume: * organizes this complex area into seven sections on key themes in gender archaeology: archaeological method and theory, human origins, division of labour, the social construction of gender, iconography and ideology, power and social hierarchies and new forms of archaeological narrative * includes section introductions which outline the history of research on each topic and present the key points of each article * presents a balance of material which rewrites women into prehistory, and articles which show how the concept of gender informs our understanding and interpretation of the past.

    But when the little girl comes from the working class, she's something else. Just what, and why so little is said about it, are the questions Valerie Walkerdine asks in Daddy's Girl, a book about how we see young girls, how they see themselves, and how popular culture mediates the view.Walkerdine's study looks at little girls on television and in the movies, in advertisements and popular songs. In figures from Annie to Shirley Temple in any number of her plucky poor girl roles, she shows us little orphans saddled with the task of representing the self-sufficient working class on the one hand and the loveable object of middle class charity on the other. The real working class girl, whose fantasies feed on a strange mix of these images and the rest of what popular culture offers, with all its glamorized sex and violence, is also the object of Walkerdine's attention. Reflecting on her own working class roots and taking us into the homes and the confidence of working class girls today as they watch television and movies and listen to popular songs, she gives us a sense, at once troubling and poignant, of the portrayal and manipulation of little girls as a canny part of the production of civilized femininity.At the center of this work is the issue of how girl children are taught to think of themselves and how their depiction puts them in their place. This concern leads Walkerdine to questions about television and parental control, about Freud's seduction theory and the origins of fantasy, about the political and erotic meaning of the ubiquitous gaze our culture trains on the little girl, and about academics' approach to the subject.

    It offers a reading of the ancient biographies as clues to the reception of the Homeric poems in Antiquity and provides an introduction to the oral tradition which lay at the source of the Homeric epics. Above all, it takes us into the world of the Odyssey, a world that lies between history and fiction. It guides the reader through a poem which rivals the modern novel in its complexity, demonstrating the unity of the poem as a whole. It defines the many and varied figures of otherness by which the Greeks of the archaic period defined themselves and underlines the values promoted by the poem's depictions of men, women, and gods. Finally, it asks why, throughout the centuries from Homer to Kazantzakis and Joyce, the hero who never forgets his homeland and dreams constantly of return has never ceased to be the incarnation of what it is to be human. This translation is a revised and much expanded version of the original French text, and includes a new chapter on the representation of women in the Odyssey and an updated bibliography.

    Since the 1960s, more that a million copies of her diary have been sold worldwide. Yet many Brazilians refused to credit someone like Carolina with authorship of such a diary, with its complicated words (some but not all of them misused) and often lyrical phrasing. Doubters preferred to believe the book was either written by Audalio Dantas, the enterprising newspaper reporter who discovered her, or that Dantas rewrote it so substantially that her book is a fraud. With the cooperation of Carolina's daughter, Vera Eunice de Jesus Lima, recent research shows that although Dantas deleted considereable portions of the diary (as well as a second one, Casa de Alvenaria), every single word was Carolina's.This book not only sets the record straight by providing detailed translations of Carolina's unedited diaries but also explains why Brazilian elites were motivated to obscure her true personality and present her as something she was not. The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus is not only about the writer but about Brazil as a whole as recorded by her sarcastic pen. The diary entries in this book span from 1958 to 1966, five years beyond text previously known to exist. They show Carolina as she was, preserving her Joycean stream-of-consciousness language, her pithy characterizations, and her allusions to antiquity.

    Looking closely at thirty telling cases from the pages of American legal history, Kerber's analysis reaches from the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," up to the present, when men and women, regardless of their marital status, still have different obligations to serve in the Armed Forces.An original and compelling consideration of American law and culture, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies emphasizes the dangers of excluding women from other civic responsibilities as well, such as loyalty oaths and jury duty. Exploring the lives of the plaintiffs, the strategies of the lawyers, and the decisions of the courts, Kerber offers readers a convincing argument for equal treatment under the law.

    The author, who has herself been surgically reassigned, has conducted extensive interviews with transsexuals from many walks of life. Her personal experiences, which inform this book, have given her an access to her subjects that others would likely be denied. While highlighting how the gender identity of transsexuals relates to hormonal and surgical changes in the body as well as to changes in dress, the book investigates the pressures and motivations to conform to expected gender roles, and the ways in which these are affected by social, educational, and professional status. Differences in the experiences of those who change from male to female and those who change from female to male are also examined.Sex reassignment has been the focus of considerable media attention recently, as increasing numbers of people feel able to talk frankly about their personal experiences with gender dysphoria. Strides with medical technology have given transsexuals new opportunities in their lives. This book provides unique insights into how these changes are seen by those people most affected them.

    It emcompasses a guide to the historiography, an assessment of the major debates, and information about the varied sources available for women's history in this period. Arranged around familiar themes - the family, work, religion, education - the book presents a comprehensive survey of the social, economic and political position of women in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

    Black and white portraits accompany many of the entries and illuminate these historically significant yet entertaining memoirs. Ranging in age from 60 to 85, the nine women featured in this book are pioneers.

    In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women's feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s. After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages-Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, Jutta Brückner's Hunger Years, Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, and Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou. By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.