Best of
Gender-Studies
2010
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Kate Bornstein - 2010
Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.
Fucking Trans Women (Issue #0)
Mira Bellwether - 2010
Sex is a very important part of my life, a very important part of all our lives, but so very little writing has been done on the sex lives of trans women that doesn’t write us off in one way or another. I found myself looking for a guide, an instruction manual, anything beyond essays on gender and problems. Fucking Trans Women is that guide." "Includes:-How-to guides-Sex stories-Instructions for various kinds of sex acts-The diversity of trans women's bodies-Trashy art & comic strips-Moments of triumph & tender anecdotes-Passionate explorations of our lusty bodies-Diagrams, and so much more!"
The Three Marks of Manhood: How to be Priest, Prophet and King of Your Family
G.C. Dilsaver - 2010
Dilsaver writes that the time has come for Catholic families to re-discover true patriarchy - time for Catholic men to accept and fulfill their role as leader and head of their families. The role of Christian manhood, as ordained by God and confirmed by Catholic teaching, is symbolized by three staffs: the Scepter of authority and self -discipline, the Crosier of spiritual stewardship, and the Cross of redemptive suffering. Christian husbands and fathers are called by God to a familial headship which is not one of old and obsolete dominance over wife and children which rose out of pagan notions of male superiority. Dilsaver promotes a new and untainted patriarchy in which the husband\'s ultimate authority is rooted in Christ\'s example of humility and self sacrificing love. The Three Marks of Manhood can help Christian families realize their identity to the fullest - empowering them to resist the encroachment of secular culture. Read it and learn how to build a strong and lasting marriage, raise children to become faithful men and women of God, and foster an authentic Catholic culture within your home.
Revolutionary Women: A Book of Stencils
Queen of the Neighbourhood - 2010
From Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, and Angela Davis to Vandana Shiva, Sylvia Rivera, and Lucy Parsons, this collection offers a subversive portrait celebrating the military prowess and revolutionary drive of these women whose violent resolve often shatters the archetype of woman as nurturer. A sampling of quotes from key writings and speeches gives voice to each woman’s ideologies, philosophies, struggles, and quiet humanity while the stencils offer further opportunities to commemorate these women and their actions through the reproduction of their likenesses.
Letters for My Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect
Megan M. RohrerC.T. Whitley - 2010
But when an individual raised by society to live, breathe and look at the world with female eyes transitions to male, some of the most enlightening, helpful and profound advice can only come in retrospect. Letter to my Brothers, features essays from respected transmen mentors who share the wisdom they wish they would have known at the beginning of their journey into manhood. 20% of the proceeds are donated to the FtM Mentors Project of TransMentors International.
Harriet Tubman
Kem Knapp Sawyer - 2010
DK Biography: Harriet Tubman tells the story of the famous abolitionist, from her childhood as a slave on a Maryland plantation, to her dramatic escape, to her tireless work as an organizer of the Underground Railroad.Supports the Common Core State Standards.
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands - 2010
Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.
Letters to Survivors: Words of Comfort for Women Recovering from Rape
Matt Atkinson - 2010
What if you really aren't alone? What if you knew there is hope that things can get better? What if you could connect with other amazing women who have been through it too, and could share their hopes, advice, wit, and wisdom with you? LETTERS TO SURVIVORS offers you that. Women from around the world, from teen to adult, have gathered to give you their personal message of hope after rape. That makes LETTERS TO SURVIVORS one of the most uplifting, life-changing books you may ever read. Every letter is presented as a work of full-color art, alongside the printed text of each letter for ease of reading. Each woman's letter addresses a different aspect of recovery from rape, such as recovering trust, coping with depression and suicidal thoughts, self-injury, spirituality/God, how to find support, how to recognize toxic so-called "helpers," how to work effectively with your therapist, how to handle discouragement, and how to find hope again. Nothing in the book is "triggering"--there is no harsh language or dark imagery. "Letters To Survivors" can be read by a person at any stage of healing, and there is no other book like it.
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
Jonathan D. Katz - 2010
Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism.Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own.Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.
The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is
Fannie Lou Hamer - 2010
Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies.As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom.Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context. The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.
Women Sex and Church
Erika Bachiochi - 2010
They promote that, contrary to popular belief, it is precisely the Church's controversial teachings on abortion, sex, marriage, contraception, and reproductive technologies that illuminate the Church's love of women and reverence for sex. Relying on biological, sociological, and medical evidence, along with personal anecdotes and experiences, these women defend Church teaching--all from a pro-woman perspective.
Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women's Health
Wenda Trevathan - 2010
Howells Book Award of the American Anthropological AssociationHow has bipedalism impacted human childbirth? Do PMS and postpartum depression have specific, maybe even beneficial, functions? These are only two of the many questions that specialists in evolutionary medicine seek to answer, and that anthropologist Wenda Trevathan addresses in Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives.Exploring a range of women's health issues that may be viewed through an evolutionary lens, specifically focusing on reproduction, Trevathan delves into issues such as the medical consequences of early puberty in girls, the impact of migration, culture change, and poverty on reproductive health, andhow fetal growth retardation affects health in later life. Hypothesizing that many of the health challenges faced by women today result from a mismatch between how their bodies have evolved and the contemporary environments in which modern humans live, Trevathan sheds light on the power andpotential of examining the human life cycle from an evolutionary perspective, and how this could improve our understanding of women's health and our ability to confront health challenges in more creative, effective ways.
African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices
Jennifer Browdy - 2010
Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern. It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies. A Choice Outstanding Academic BookOutstanding Book, selected by the Public Library AssociationBest Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young - 2010
That's taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren't more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads.In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of "human brain organization theory," Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn't scientific at all.Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. "The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure... Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development."
Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event
Trinh T. Minh-ha - 2010
Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in both independent filmmaking and cultural politics.Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders--as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee-in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which "every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries," Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this "epoch of global fear."Elsewhere, Within Here is essential reading for those interested in contemporary feminist thought and postcolonial studies.
Shirin Neshat
Marina Abramović - 2010
Since then, the Iranian-born artist has continued to explore difficult subjects: the boundaries between East and West, men and women, the sacred and the profane, exile and belonging. Her work is marked by its graphic boldness and stirring imagery: photographs of women cloaked in black veils with excerpts of Farsi poetry inscribed across the surface; videos of clans of men and women in barren landscapes chanting or groups of men and women listening to rousing moralistic sermons in a public hall; and, as in her most recent projects, magical realist works in which women fly or plant themselves in gardens to ensure their fertility.Renowned art critic and historian Arthur C. Danto explores the entirety of the artist’s rich and varied oeuvre, from the earliest photographs to her latest work, the film Women Without Men. Her first feature film, for which she was awarded the prestigious Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, is based on the novella of the same name that was banned in Iran; it has taken nearly seven years to complete. In addition to the important essay by Danto, the book includes a foreword in the form of a letter by artist Marina Abramović and commentaries for each series of work by Neshat herself, allowing a glimpse into the creative process of one of the most unique artists of her time.
Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam
Kecia Ali - 2010
Juggling scripture, precedent, and custom on one hand, and the requirements or logical consistency on the other, legal scholars engaged in vigorous debate. The emerging consensus demonstrated a sell-perpetuating analogy between a husband's status as master and a wife's as slave, even as jurists insisted on the dignity of free women and, increasingly, the masculine rights of enslaved husbands.Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam presents the first systematic analysis of how these jurists conceptualized marriage (its rights and obligations) using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery. Kecia Ali explores parallels between marriage and concubinage that legitimized sex and legitimated offspring using eighth- through tenth-century legal texts. As the jurists discussed claims spouses could make on each other (including dower, sex, obedience, and companionship) they returned repeatedly to issues of legal status -- wife and concubine, slave and free, male and female.Complementing the growing body of scholarship on Islamic marital and family law, Ali boldly contributes to the ongoing debates over feminism, sexuality, and reform in Islam.
Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women
Holly Kearl - 2010
To achieve true gender equality, it must come to an end. Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women draws on academic studies, informal surveys, news articles, and interviews with activists to explore the practice's definition and prevalence, the societal contexts in which it occurs, and the role of factors such as race and sexual orientation. Perhaps more crucially, the book makes clear how women experience street harassment--how they feel about and respond to it--and the ways it negatively impacts lives.But understanding is only a beginning. In the second half of the book, readers will find concrete strategies for dealing with street harassers and ways to become involved in working to end this all-too-common violation. Educators, counselors, parents, and other concerned individuals will discover resources for teaching about harassment and modeling behavior that will help prevent harassment incidents.
When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty
Mark Rifkin - 2010
notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, andanthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.
Gender: The Key Concepts
Mary Evans - 2010
Each entry provides a critical definition of the concept, examining the background to the idea, its usage and the major figures associated with the term. Taking a truly interdisciplinary and global view of gender studies, concepts covered include:Agency Diaspora Heteronormativity Subjectivity Performativity Class Feminist Politics Body Gender identity Reflexivity.With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout the text, Gender: The Key Concepts unweaves the relationships between different aspects of the field defined as gender studies, and is essential for all those studying gender in interdisciplinary contexts as undergraduates, postgraduates and beyond.
Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture
Cheryl Suzack - 2010
A vital and sophisticated discussion, these timely essays will change the way we think about modern feminism and Indigenous women.
New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation
Chris Bobel - 2010
For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second- and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women's movement. Through her critical ethnographic lens, Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category "gender") and challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, "New Blood" reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists "culture jamming" commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing "holistic womb health," and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today's feminism-on-the-ground--indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.
Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject
Kirsten Pai Buick - 2010
Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott - 2010
Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.
Intrepid Women: Cantinieres and Vivandieres of the French Army
Thomas Cardoza - 2010
Technically non-combatant spouses of active-duty soldiers, they fought and died in every conflict from the wars of the Revolution through colonial campaigns in Algeria, Mexico, West Africa, and Indochina. At a time when women were strictly controlled by the Napoleonic Code, cantinieres owned property, traveled widely, and exercised a fierce independence from their husbands. However, despite their actions, they passed largely under the radar of the growing feminist and anti-feminist movements that flourished in France from 1792 onward. Based on extensive archival research as well as published sources, Intrepid Women is the first serious book-length study of a previously ignored aspect of women's and military history.
Reading Chican@ Like a Queer: The De-Mastery of Desire
Sandra K. Soto - 2010
The author demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is an unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature.
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter
Joan C. Williams - 2010
Despite what is often reported, new mothers don t opt out of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today s workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children.Conventional wisdom attributes women s decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men both those who seek to avoid the breadwinner role and those who embrace it as well as women. Faced with masculine norms that define the workplace, women must play the tomboy or the femme. Both paths result in a gender bias that is exacerbated when the two groups end up pitted against each other. And although work-family issues long have been seen strictly through a gender lens, we ignore class at our peril. The dysfunctional relationship between the professional-managerial class and the white working class must be addressed before real reform can take root.Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families."
Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us
Carole Joffe - 2010
In these pages, reproductive-health researcher Carole Joffe shows how a pervasive stigma—cultivated by the religious right—operates to maintain barriers to access by shaming women and marginalizing abortion providers. Through compelling testimony from doctors, health-care workers, and patients, Joffe reports the lived experiences behind the polemics, while also offering hope for a more compassionate standard of women’s health care. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba
Karen Bouwer - 2010
Patrice Lumumba’s legacy continues to fire the imagination of politicians, activists, and artists. But women have been missing from accounts of the Congo’s decolonization. What new ideals of masculinity and femininity were generated in this struggle? Were masculinist biases re-inscribed in later depictions of the martyred nationalist? Through analysis of Lumumba’s writings and speeches, the life stories of women activists, and literary and cinematic works, Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba challenges male-centered interpretations of Congolese nationalism and illustrates how generic conventions both reinforced and undercut gender bias in representations of Lumumba and his female contemporaries.
Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia
Anne Rasmussen - 2010
Anne K. Rasmussen explores a rich public soundscape, where women recite the divine texts of the Qur'an, and where an extraordinary diversity of Arab-influenced Islamic musical styles and genres, also performed by women, flourishes. Based on unique and revealing ethnographic research beginning at the end of Suharto's “New Order” and continuing into the era of “Reformation,” the book considers the powerful role of music in the expression of religious nationalism. In particular, it focuses on musical style, women's roles, and the ideological and aesthetic issues raised by the Indonesian style of recitation.
School Trouble: Identity, Power and Politics in Education
Deborah Youdell - 2010
For this reason schools are important sites of counter- or radical- politics. In this book, Deborah Youdell brings together theories of counter-politics and radical traditions in education to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and explores a range of resources for thinking about and enacting political practices that make 'school trouble'.The book offers a solid introduction to the much-debated issues of 'intersectionality' and the limits of identity politics and the relationship between schooling and the wider policy and political context. It pieces together a series of tools and tactics that might destabilize educational inequalities by unsettling the knowledges, meanings, practices, subjectivities and feelings that are normalized and privileged in the 'business as usual' of school life. Engaging with curriculum materials, teachers' lesson plans and accounts of their pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of school practices, the book investigates a range of empirical examples of critical action in school, from overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teachers and students. The book draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make sense of these practices and identify the political possibilities for educators who refuse to accept the everyday injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities that face us.School Trouble appears at a moment of political and economic flux and uncertainty, and when the policy moves that have promoted markets and private sector involvement in education around the globe have been subject to intense scrutiny and critique. Against this backdrop, renewed attention is being paid to the questions of how politics might be rejuvenated, how societies might be made fair, and what role education might have in pursing this. This book makes an important intervention into this terrain. By exploring a politics of discourse, an anti-identity politics, a politics of feeling, and a politics of becoming, it shows how the education assemblage can be unsettled and education can be re-imagined. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, cultural studies, and social and political science as well as to critical educators looking for new tools for thinking about their practice.