Best of
Gender-Studies

2004

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism


Patricia Hill Collins - 2004
    In Black Sexual Politics, one of America's most influential writers on race and gender explores how images of Black sexuality have been used to maintain the color line and how they threaten to spread a new brand of racism around the world today.

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines


Gail Collins - 2004
    It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too. "The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history.

Undoing Gender


Judith Butler - 2004
    In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern and fail to govern gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class


Michelle TeaLis Goldschmidt - 2004
    It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can’t go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet, to "jumping" class, how if time equals money then being poor means waiting, surviving and returning to the ghetto and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernández, Frances Varian, Tara Hardy, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Ryan, and more.

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject


Saba Mahmood - 2004
    Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

There Is A Season


Patrick Lane - 2004
    He lives on Vancouver Island, a place of uncommon beauty, where the climate is mild, the air is soft, and the growing season lasts nearly all year long.Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and sees his garden’s life as intertwined with his own. And when he gave up drinking, after years of addiction, he found solace and healing in tending to his yard. In this exquisitely written memoir, he relates stories of his hard early life in the context of the landscape he’s created. As he observes the seasonal changes, a plant or a bird or the way a tree bends in the wind brings to mind an episode from his storied past.Lane writes evocative descriptions of the animals, birds, insects, and plants that are his garden, and of the relationship he has to them all. Accompany Lane as he wanders his garden, where botanical “madeleines” release in him a flood of memory.From the Hardcover edition.

Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex


Julia Sudbury - 2004
    The distinguished contributors to this collection offer a variety of perspectives, from former prisoners to advocates to scholars from around the world. The book is a must-read for anyone concerned by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex within and beyond U.S. borders, as well as those interested in globalization and resistance.

Becoming a Visible Man


Jamison Green - 2004
    Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment.For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual people--as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others--enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences--including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery--the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People


Joan Roughgarden - 2004
    A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science—and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality.Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.

Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker


Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw - 2004
    These visually arresting narratives draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the antebellum South and contemporary culture. Walker’s work has been featured in exhibits around the world and in American museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. At the same time, her ideologically provocative images have drawn vociferous criticism from several senior African American artists, and a number of her pieces have been pulled from exhibits amid protests against their disturbing representations. Seeing the Unspeakable provides a sustained consideration of the controversial art of Kara Walker.Examining Walker’s striking silhouettes, evocative gouache drawings, and dynamic prints, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw analyzes the inspiration for and reception of four of Walker’s pieces: The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, John Brown, A Means to an End, and Cut. She offers an overview of Walker’s life and career, and contextualizes her art within the history of African American visual culture and in relation to the work of contemporary artists including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Michael Ray Charles. Shaw describes how Walker deliberately challenges viewers’ sensibilities with radically de-sentimentalized images of slavery and racial stereotypes. This book reveals a powerful artist who is questioning, rather than accepting, the ideas and strategies of social responsibility that her parents’ generation fought to establish during the civil rights era. By exploiting the racist icons of the past, Walker forces viewers to see the unspeakable aspects of America’s racist past and conflicted present.

Fashioning Gothic Bodies


Catherine Spooner - 2004
    It makes an explicit connection between the veils, masks and disguises of Gothic convention, and historically-specific fashion discourses, from the revealing chemise-dress popularized by Queen Marie Antoinette to the subcultural style of contemporary Goths. In so doing it sheds new light on the cultural construction of Gothic bodies. Taking an original interdisciplinary approach, Catherine Spooner offers readings of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts in the context of fashion from the 1790s to the 1990s. Progressing chronologically from the novels of Radcliffe and Lewis through the "sensation" fiction of the Victorian period and the Gothic fiction of the fin-de-siècle, Fashioning Gothic Bodies culminates with twentieth-century film and the supposed resurgence of the Gothic in pre-Millennial culture.

The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's Rights and How to Fight Back


Gloria Feldt - 2004
    The War on Choice chronicles the actions being taken at the highest levels of government to turn back the clock on women's rights. With the White House acting in anti-choice lockstep with the majorities in both House and Senate, religious extremists are now in key decision-making posts, our federal judiciary is filled with recent appointees whose values are drastically out of step with the pro-choice sentiments of the majority of the American people, abstinence-only sex education is now the rule, ideology has trumped science in domestic and global health policy, and the Supreme Court balance in favor of reproductive freedoms is perilously close to toppling. But while many of the individual facts are known, no one until now has connected all the dots and drawn the Big Picture that shows exactly how radical and how successful this quiet revolution has been.Judge by judge, law by law, and appointee by appointee, The War on Choice speaks the truth about what is happening, and also tells the stories of some of the women whose lives have been affected by these court decisions and federal policies. A keen analysis of current events, combined with a hands-on plan of action for those who want to raise their voices in protest, this book will be riveting reading.And there is no one better equipped to write about the insidious, step-by step chipping away of rights, or about what we can do to fight back, than Gloria Feldt, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her thirty years of work with the organization combined with her personal experience - as a woman who came out of the same West Texas political landscape as did George W. Bush but faced a very different economic and social reality as the mother of three children by the age of 20 make her the ideal spokeswoman for those who are alarmed by the current political climate.?This book will be a wake-up call, describing in jaw-dropping detail the story of what the anti-choice movement is doing to the rights to birth control, abortion and privacy.?

Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is


Abigail Garner - 2004
    Like the millions of children growing up in these families today, she often found herself in the middle of the political and moral debates surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parenting.Drawing on a decade of community organizing, and interviews with more than fifty grown sons and daughters of LGBT parents, Garner addresses such topics as coming out to children, facing homophobia at school, co-parenting with ex-partners, the impact of AIDS, and the children's own sexuality.Both practical and deeply personal, Families Like Mine provides an invaluable insider's perspective for LGBT parents, their families, and their allies.

Ebony Rising: Short Fiction of the Greater Harlem Renaissance Era


Craig Gable - 2004
    This was a time marked by writing of extraordinary breadth and depth by some of the most famous authors in African American literary history. Among them were Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Dorothy West, and Claude McKay. Not surprisingly, these authors have received an unprecedented amount of critical attention, and their work remains popular to this day.For this anthology, Craig Gable has selected 52 short stories by 37 writers (20 women and 17 men) representing a wide range of style, form, subject matter, and social awareness. To underscore the movement's growth and change, the stories are arranged chronologically by year of publication. Some will be familiar to readers; many more will not, for this is not the "greatest hits" of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, readers will find a remarkable collection of fiction by authors famous and obscure--some who lived in New York City and others who never resided there. There are stories set in Harlem, but they are just as likely to take place elsewhere in the United States. Alongside traditional stories, there are examples of detective fiction, political satire, even science fiction, with a few experiments in narrative structure and form for good measure. The stories take up issues of race, marriage, parenthood, crime, politics, religion, work, abuse, old age, and death--in short, the stuff of life, and of compelling and lasting fiction.A selected bibliography documents some 300 books and articles on the Harlem Renaissance. There is a separate list of sources for other short stories by the authors appearing in this anthology; a list of award-winning short fiction from two black literary contests of the day; timelines of important historical, literary, and cultural events; and other aids for teachers, students, and reading groups.

Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls: A Coloring Book


Jacinta Bunnell - 2004
    32 original illustrations with captions like "Calvin, baking is fun and all, but we can make a rad drum set out of these pots and bowls" and "Don't let gender box you in" offer light-hearted, fun ways to deconstruct gender for both children and adults. The coloring book form is a subversive and playful way to examine how perversive stereotypes about gender are in every aspect of our lives, especially the ones that are so ingrained we don't even notice. Girls Will be Boys Will be Girls pokes fun at the tired constraints of gender normativity, and makes it okay to step outside the lines.

Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism


Tamar Ross - 2004
    Surprisingly, very little work has been done in this area, beyond exploring the leeway for ad hoc solutions to practical problems as they arise on the halakhic plane. Most Jewish feminist critiques addressing broader theological concerns are conducted by non-Orthodox, Anglo-educated women. Their works attempt to locate in Judaism the root causes for what is allegedly wrong with the past and current state of women and offer suggestions for more fundamental reform. In relying on an avowedly selective range of sources and ignoring the full stock of Judaism's rich interpretive tradition, such studies bypass internal tools and concepts of the existing halakhic establishment and fail to engage the unique religious assumptions of the living community most totally committed to its tenets. Ross believes that this approach--in many ways extrinsic to the reality it purports to affect--has little chance of gaining the type of halakhic or theological credibility crucial for wholehearted acceptance by the Orthodox mainstream. Writing as an insider (herself an Orthodox Jew), Ross confronts the radical feminist critique of Judaism as a religion deeply entrenched in patriarchy. In exposing the largely androcentric thrust of the rabbinic tradition and its biblical grounding, she sees this critique as posing a potential threat to the theological heart of traditional Judaism--the belief in divine revelation. Ross seeks to develop a theological response that fully acknowledges the male bias of Judaism's sanctified texts, yet nevertheless provides a rationale for transforming the relative import and significance of that bias in today's world without undermining their authority. Uncovering aspects of Jewish tradition that support this response, Ross proposes an approach to divine revelation which she calls "cumulativism." Building upon some interesting points of contact between postmodernist thinking and traditional Jewish ideas with regard to the meaning and function of religious language and the significance of context, this approach is based on a conflating of strict boundaries between text and its interpretation, or divine intent and the evolution of human understanding. Ross believes that the greater fluidity afforded by cumulativism in understanding the mechanics of revelation and halakhic deliberation is necessary for legitimizing the insights of feminism and fully absorbing women's changed status within the religious rubric of Jewish tradition. Emphasizing that continuity with tradition can be maintained only when the halakhic system is understood as a living and dynamic organism that grows via affirmation of its historical legacy and respect for its constraints, her book shows that the feminist revolution in Orthodox Judaism reaches beyond its practical effect upon individual lives to teach us something more profound about the nature of religious practice in general.

Dangerous Memories: A Mosaic of Mary in Scripture


Elizabeth A. Johnson - 2004
    Dangerous Memories is taken from her acclaimed Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (0-8264-1473-7), with the addition of a new introduction and a short annotated bibliography.

The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy


Susan Groag Bell - 2004
    Susan Bell recounts both her long search for a series of sixteenth-century tapestries that celebrated women and her efforts to understand their meaning for Queen Elizabeth I of England and the other powerful women who owned them. Opening a new window on the lives of noblewomen in the Renaissance, the brilliantly colored tapestries that were the ultimate artistic luxury of the day, and the popular and influential fourteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, Bell pursues a compelling tale that moves from centuries past to today.The tapestries around which this story revolves are linked to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405), orginally published six hundred years ago in 1405. The book is a tribute to women that honors two hundred female warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of cities. Though twenty-five manuscripts of the City of Ladies still exist, references to tapestries based on the book are elusive. Bell takes us along as she tracks down records of six sets of tapestries whose owners included Elizabeth I of England; Margaret of Austria; and Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Bell examines the intriguing details of these women's lives—their arranged marriages, their power, their affairs of state—asking what interest they had in owning these particular tapestries. Could the tapestries have represented their thinking? As she reveals the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of this unique story, Bell also gives a fascinating account of medieval and early-Renaissance tapestry production and of Christine de Pizan's remarkable life and legacy.

Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities


Michael S. Kimmel - 2004
    The Handbook provides a broad view of masculinities primarily across the social sciences, with the inclusion of important debates in some areas of the humanities and natural sciences. The various approaches presented in this Handbook range across different disciplines, theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and conceptualizations in relation to the topic of men. Editors Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert W. Connell have assembled an esteemed group of contributors who are among the best-known experts in their particular fields.

Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts


Bee Lavender - 2004
    The book includes confessions and conversations about the true, exhilarating, entertaining, and difficult aspects of remaining creative while raising kids. It’s a smart, sexy, alternately funny and heartbreaking look at balancing art and motherhood, told in the artists’ own words.

Gendered Discourses


Jane Sunderland - 2004
    It also examines the actual workings of discourses in terms of construction and their potential to "damage". For upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in discourse analysis, gender studies, social psychology and media studies.

Sex, Self and Society: The Social Context of Sexuality (with InfoTrac) (Wadsworth Sociology Reader)


Tracey Steele - 2004
    The reader focuses on sexuality as both process and as a social institution. Contemporary issues such as abortion and sexually transmitted diseases are the focus of the last part of the reader.

"After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement


Cheryl Clark - 2004
    Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on.  She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.  Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.

Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York


Mark Turner - 2004
    Too often in discussions of urban space and interpretations of urban culture, streetwalking implies a rigid model for the way we inhabit the streets. Beginning with the simple premise that we all walk the streets differently, Mark Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that it is the defining experience of what it means to be modern. Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city. Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.

The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel


Thomas McGinn - 2004
    Close examination of the social and legal position of Roman meretrices and Greek hetairai have enriched our understanding of ancient sexual relationships and the status of women in these societies. These studies have focused, however, almost exclusively on the legal and literary evidence.McGinn approaches the issues from a new direction, by studying the physical venues that existed for the sale of sex, in the context of the Roman economy. Combining textual and material evidence, he provides a detailed study of Roman brothels and other venues of venal sex (from imperial palaces and privates houses to taverns, circuses, and back alleys) focusing on their forms, functions, and urban locations.The book covers the central period of Roman history, roughly from 200 B.C. to A.D. 250. It will especially interest social and legal historians of the ancient world, and students of gender, sexuality, and the family.Thomas A. J. McGinn is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Vanderbilt University.

American Girl


Cynie Cory - 2004
    Cynie Cory's poetry delves into the nature of identity, gender, and American experience with frequently remarkable results."Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart's territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart of her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson sharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love the broken fragments, the fallen leaves and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out she's driving down your street." Barbara Hamby"

Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema


Jacqueline Reich - 2004
    In Beyond the Latin Lover, Jacqueline Reich unmasks the reality behind the myth. In her investigation of many of Mastroianni's most famous characters in Italian cinema, she reveals that beneath the image of hyper-masculinity lies the figure of the inetto, the Italian schlemiel at odds with and out of place in a rapidly changing world. Diverse roles throughout his career--the impotent man, the cuckold, and the unruly woman's victim, among others--present an anti-hero caught in traditional but increasingly unsteady modes of masculinity. Far from being a study of just one Italian film star, however, Reich's work demonstrates that Mastroianni's inetto is a reflection of the unstable political, social, and sexual climate of post-war Italy and its constantly shifting gender roles.

Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women


Lucy Bolton - 2004
    Lucy Bolton compares these films with those which offer more standard — albeit provocative and interesting — treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, well-known films alongside the recent, experimental films illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create complex and provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Luce Irigaray in relation to women's cultivation of self-knowledge, this book examines each female character as she goes through a process of transition or transformation. This approach demonstrates how participating in the encounter between Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield greater understanding of both fields.

Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900


Leslie Brubaker - 2004
    300 and 900, this study examines the women, men and eunuchs who lived in the late Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and western European civilizations. It assesses the ways in which gender identity was established and manifested in written and material cultural forms, emphasizing the integral relationship between the masculine and feminine by exploring costume, attitudes to the body, social and political institutions and a wide range of literary genres.

One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests


Elizabeth Jameson - 2004
    Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women’s history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 “Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History,” Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text for pioneering scholars of this emergent, interdisciplinary field.

Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations


Cheryl J. Fish - 2004
    Fish argues that the concept of mobility offers a significant paradigm for reading literature of the United States and the Americas in the antebellum period, particularly for women writers of the African diaspora. Charting journeys across nations and literary traditions, she examines works by three undervalued writers--Mary Seacole, an Afro-Jamaican; Nancy Prince, an African American from Boston; and Margaret Fuller, a white New Englander and Transcendentalist--in whose lives mobility, travel literature, and benevolent work all converge.             Refiguring the forms of domesticity, they traveled to the outposts of conflict and imperial expansion--colonial crossroads in Panama, Tsarist Russia, the Crimean War front, the U.S. frontier, and Jamaica after emancipation--and worked as healers, educators, and reformers. Each writer blended themes from exploration literature and various autobiographical genres to reconfigure racial and national identities and to issue a call for social action. They intervened strategically into discourses of medicine, education, religion, philanthropy, and emigration through a shifting and mobile subjectivity, negotiating relationships to various institutions, persons, and locations. For each woman, travel removed her from the familiar and placed her in a position of risk, "out-of-bounds," emotionally or physically. Seeking their own vision of the territories, they came to see themselves as citizens of the world, deeply involved in the causes they witnessed. As Fish documents, their desire to improve the quality of life for oppressed and wounded peoples distinguishes their works from other popular travel writers of the time.             Drawing upon unpublished archival material such as letters, journals, and abolitionist periodicals, Fish incorporates print culture and theory into her discussion. She also examines historical accounts of the events and places with which these women were associated. She describes how Prince draws on the Bible and missionary discourse to make corrective readings of emigration policy and the lives of former slaves; Seacole appropriates the picaresque to embed her knowledge of Afro-Jamaican and Western medical tradition, and Fuller combines Romanticism and a fascination with racial science in her analysis of the American Midwest and in her evolving feminist critique. While writing in the popular 19th-century genre of the travelogue, Fish says, these black and white women were able to talk back, make and lose money, challenge stereotypes, and inform and entertain people with their adventures and benevolent work.

The Women's Movement in Postcolonial Indonesia: Gender and Nation in a New Democracy


Elizabeth Martyn - 2004
    It questions the meaning of democratization for women and their relationship to national sovereignty within the new Indonesian state, and discusses women's organizations and their activities; women's social and economic roles; and the different cultural, regional and ethnic attitudes towards women, while showing the failure of political change to fully address women's gender interests and needs. The author argues that both the role of nationalism in defining gender identity and the role of gender in defining national identity need equal recognition.

Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa


Signe Arnfred - 2004
    The volume brings together papers by African and Nordic/Scandinavian gender scholars and anthropologists, in attempts to investigate and critically discuss existing lines of thinking about sexuality in Africa.

The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict: Theory, Application, and Practice


Alice H. Eagly - 2004
    Kelman, a psychologist who is both a scientist and a peacemaker. Kelman is renowned for his contributions to the study of social influence in social psychology as well as to international conflict resolution and the peace research movement. He developed the interactive problem solving method, which helped lay the groundwork for the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO. His work has profoundly affected the ways in which social psychologists think about the links between personal and national identity, between intragroup and intergroup processes and between individual behaviour and the functioning of social systems. scholarship through the examination of their own theories and research. Their work explores the four areas that have defined Kelman's career: the ethics of social research, conformity and obedience, national identity and nationalism, and ethnic conflict resolution. The chapters consider the theoretical foundations of research on social influence and social conflict and the application of theory to issues of health, educational practices, organizational effectiveness, international peace, and the practice of conflict resolution. This provocative collection of essays illustrates the broad scope that Kelman's work encompasses and demonstrates that psychology can be a powerful tool for individual, organizational, and societal change.

Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives


Ursula King - 2004
    In recent years, women's and gender studies have transformed the international study of religion through the use of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodologies, which have opened up new and highly controversial issues, challenging previous paradigms and creating fresh fields of study. As this book shows, gender studies in religion raises new and difficult questions about the gendered nature of religious phenomena, the relationship between power and knowledge, the authority of religious texts and institutions, and the involvement and responsibility of the researcher undertaking such studies as a gendered subject.This book is the outcome of an international collaboration between a wide range of researchers from different countries and fields of religious studies. The range and diversity of their contributions is the very strength of this book, for it shows how gendering works in studying different religious materials, whether foundational texts from the Bible or Koran, philosophical ideas about truth, essentialism, history or symbolism, the impact of French feminist thinkers such as Irigaray or Kristeva, or again critical perspectives dealing with the impact of race, gender, and class on religion, or by deconstructing religious data from a postcolonial critical standpoint or examining the impact of imperialism and orientalism on religion and gender.