Best of
Gender-Studies
2011
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Eric A. Stanley - 2011
The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.
Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law
Dean Spade - 2011
This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same "neutral" legal structures.Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law raises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a "legal rights framework," but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.An attorney, educator, and trans activist, Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice.
The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities
Ching-In ChenBran Fenner - 2011
We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social changeand delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic.
Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide.
Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
Are We Not All Mothers?
Sheri Dew - 2011
In this inspiring booklet, Sheri Dew lovingly explains that it is a woman's calling to help lead the rising generation through the streets of mortality and that women are the Lord's secret weapon whether they have children or not.Sheri says, �As daughters of our Heavenly Father, and as daughters of Eve, we are all mothers and we have always been mothers. . . . Motherhood is more than bearing children, though it is certainly that. It is the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us.�
Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature
Qwo-Li Driskill - 2011
This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialoguea writing in conversation”among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,” this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.
Down There: Sexual and Reproductive Health
Susun S. Weed - 2011
Susun Weed, the voice of the Wise Woman Tradition, has spent the last twenty-five years listening to what’s between our legs. Her new book gives voices to all those parts, describes them in health, and offers alternative, complementary, integrative, homeopathic, and allopathic remedies for their distresses. Whether your “down there” gives you pleasure or pain, Ms. Weed’s simple, successful, strategies optimize health.“Filled with beauty, truth, wisdom and healing.” Christiane Northrup, MD, author Get the answers to your most intimate questions right now. Do you have it? What can you do?Orgasms Fibroids Prostate ProblemsVirility Incontinence Hysterectomy AlternativesDesire Infertility Sex Infections/STDsPCOS Cervical Issues Healing After TraumaUTIs Endometriosis Chronic Pelvic PainLUTS Hemorrhoids Dry Vagina You'll find a full range of options, fully explained and well-illustrated, so you can make the very best choices for your good health. • Homeopathic remedies • Nourishing herbal infusions • Emotional aids • Dietary strategies • Herbal stars • Alternative medicines • Helpful/harmful drugs • Successful surgery • Shamanic/soul work"Feel good in your body. Feel good in your spirit. Take this time away from demands and feel good. Lean against me as you sing. Lean against me and sing with me until the bones of the Ancients ring with ecstacy. Sing yourself to sleep. Sing yourself to wholeness, sing yourself to joy."- also available as a 3 hour audio lecture: Down There, digital download
Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism
Krysta WilliamsAshling Ligate - 2011
actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.
Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
Miriam I. Ticktin - 2011
Miriam Ticktin focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—Ticktin asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? She demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, making conditions like HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. Ticktin’s analysis also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices that criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
Ivan E. CoyoteAnne Fleming - 2011
The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.
Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement
Maylei Blackwell - 2011
As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities.Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.
African Sexualities: A Reader
Sylvia Tamale - 2011
It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression—including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs—to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways.
A Guide to Biblical Manhood
Randy Stinson - 2011
How to serve your wife, how to mold men through baseball, how to make men in the church and more practical theology for cultivating men of God who are doers of the Word for the sake of the Gospel.
Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary
Morty Diamond - 2011
Rarely has a book about lust been full of so much love, conflict, and intelligence. If you think you already know what's in these stories, or you think you don't need to know, you're wrong."—Patrick Califa, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of TransgenderismExploring the crossroads of gender and sexuality, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary offers unusually engaging narratives that create a raw and honest depiction of dating, sex, love, and relationships among members of the gender variant community. FTM, MTF, thirdgender, genderqueer, and other non-traditional identities beyond the gender binary of traditional male and female are included in this often heartwarming, occasionally heartbreaking, always heartfelt groundbreaking anthology. From monogamous love and marriage to anonymous sex and one-night hook-ups (and everything in between), these stories offer readers insight into the precarious emotional and practical mechanics of intimacy among gender-variant experiences.Features contributions from award-winning authors including Julia Serano, Sassafras Lowery, and Max Valerio, alongside outstanding new writing by Tribe 8 guitarist and acclaimed film director Silas Howard, activist Joelle Ruby Ryan, filmmaker Ashley Altadonna, SisterSpit alum Cooper Lee Bombardier, and many other unique and talented voices.
Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature
Michelle Ann Abate - 2011
More to the point, the field of children's literature needs such a collection."---Katherine Capshaw Smith, University of ConnecticutIn spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature ---including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace---while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.Over the Rainbow collects essays by Jes Battis, Robin Bernstein, Thomas Crisp, June Cummins, Elizabeth A. Ford, Sherrie A. Inness, Christine A. Jenkins, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Biddy Martin, Robert McRuer, Claudia Nelson, Jody Norton, Tison Pugh, Catherine Tosenberger, Eric L. Tribunella, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Andrea Wood. These pieces will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's literature, American Studies, LGBTQ and queer studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.Cover art: Original title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. New York: George M. Hill, 1900.
Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization
Grace Kyungwon Hong - 2011
The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.ContributorsVictor BascaraLisa Marie CachoM. Bianet Castellanos Martha Chew Sánchez Roderick A. FergusonGrace Kyungwon HongHelen H. JunKara Keeling Sanda Mayzaw Lwin Jodi Melamed Chandan Reddy Ruby C. TapiaCynthia Tolentino
European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe
Fatima El-Tayeb - 2011
Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.
Capital Courtesans: Public Women of Civil War Richmond and Washington, DC
Thomas P. Lowry - 2011
Includes sociology and Biblical injunctions, one in Greek. The only book to cover prostitution in both Civil War capitals.
Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence
Marjorie E. Wieseman - 2011
Moments frozen in paint that reveal young women sewing, reading or playing musical instruments, captured in Vermeer's uniquely luminous style, recreate a silent and often mysterious domestic realm, closed to the outside world, and inhabited almost exclusively by women and children. Three internationally recognized experts in the field explain why women engaged in mundane domestic tasks, or in pleasurable pastimes such as music making, writing letters, or adjusting their toilette, comprise some of the most popular Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Among the most intriguing of these compositions are those that consciously avoid any engagement with the viewer. Rather than acknowledging our presence, figures avert their gazes or turn their backs upon us; they stare moodily into space or focus intently on the activities at hand. In viewing these paintings, we have the impression that we have stumbled upon a private world kept hidden from casual regard. The ravishingly beautiful paintings of Vermeer are perhaps the most poetic evocations of this secretive world, but other Dutch painters sought to imbue simple domestic scenes with an air of silent mystery, and the book also features works by some of the most important masters of 17th-century Dutch genre painting, among them Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maes, and Jan Steen.
The Truth about Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes about Our Children
Caryl Rivers - 2011
Barnett are widely acclaimed for their analyses of women, men, and society. In The Truth About Girls and Boys, they tackle a new, troubling trend in the theorizing of gender: that the learning styles, brain development, motivation, cognitive and spatial abilities, and "natural" inclinations of girls and boys are so fundamentally different, they require unique styles of parenting and education.Ignoring the science that challenges these claims, those who promote such theories make millions while frightening parents and educators into enforcing old stereotypes and reviving unhealthy attitudes in the classroom. Rivers and Barnett unmake the pseudoscientific rationale for this argument, stressing the individuality of each child and the specialness of his or her talents and desires. They recognize that in our culture, girls and boys encounter different stimuli and experiences, yet encouraging children to venture outside their comfort zones helps them realize a multifaceted character. Educating parents, teachers, and general readers in the true nature of the gender game, Rivers and Barnett enable future generations to transform if not transcend the parameters of sexual difference.
The Weather in Proust
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 2011
This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.
Old Norse Women's Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds
Sandra Ballif Straubhaar - 2011
This book presents a bilingual edition (Old Norse and English) with commentary and notes of this material, from the ninth to the thirteenth century and beyond. The poems reflect the dramatic and often violent nature of the sagas: they feature Viking Age shipboard adventures and shipwrecks; prophecies; curses; declarations of love and of revenge; duels, feuds and battles; encounters with ghosts; marital and family discord; and religious insults, among many other topics. Their authors fall into four main categories: pre-Christian Norwegian and Icelandic skaldkonur of the Viking Age; Icelandic skaldkonur of the Sturlung Age (thirteenth century); additional early skaldkonur from the Islendingasogur and related material, not as historically verifiable as the first group; and mythical figures cited as reciting verse in the legendary sagas (fornaldarsogur).
Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies
Catherine M. Orr - 2011
Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes
Ben Saunders - 2011
But according to Ben Saunders, the appeal of the superhero is fundamentally metaphysical - even spiritual - in nature. In chapter-length analyses of the early comic book adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and Iron-Man, Saunders explores a number of complex philosophical and theological issues, including: the problem of evil; the will-to-power; the tension between intimacy and vulnerability; and the challenge of love, in the face of mortality. He concludes that comic book fantasies of the superhuman ironically reveal more than we might care to admit about our human limitations, even as they expose the falsehood of the characteristically modern opposition between religion and science. Clearly and passionately written, this insightful and at times exhilarating book should delight all readers who believe in the redemptive capacity of the imagination, regardless of whether they consider themselves comic book fans.
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History
Susan L. Mann - 2011
Moreover, China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. Sexual desire and sexual activity were viewed as innate human needs, essential to bodily health and well-being, and universal marriage and reproduction served the state by supplying tax-paying subjects, duly bombarded with propaganda about family values. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? In this wonderfully written and enthralling book, Susan Mann answers that question by focusing in turn on state policy, ideas about the physical body, and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bar; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.
New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity
Rosalind Gill - 2011
The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies.
Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules
Chris Bobel - 2011
This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives
Alecia Youngblood Jackson - 2011
It uses a common data set and utilizes various theoretical perspectives through which to view the data. It challenges qualitative researchers to use theory to accomplish a rigorous, analytic reading of qualitative data. Plugging in the theory and the data produces a variety of readings applying various theorists and their concepts, including:Derrida - DeconstructionSpivak - Postcolonial MarginalityFoucault - Power/KnowledgeButler - PerformativityDeleuze - DesireBarad - Material Intra-activity Thinking With Theory In Qualitative Research pushes against traditional qualitative data analysis such as mechanistic coding, reducing data to themes, and writing up transparent narratives. These do little to critique the complexities of social life; such simplistic approaches preclude dense and multi-layered treatment of data. It shows that thinking with theory pushes research and data and theory to its exhaustion in order to produce knowledge differently. By refusing a closed system for fixed meaning, a new analytic is engaged to keep meaning on the move. The result is an extension of thought beyond an easy sense.Special features of the book include schematic cues to help guide the reader through what might be new theoretical terrain, interludes that explain the possibilities of thinking with a particular concept and theorist and detailed chapters that plug the same data set into a specific concept. This vital tool will help researchers understand and fully utilize their powers of data analysis and will prove invaluable to both students and experienced researchers across all of the social sciences.
Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America
Lynne Gerber - 2011
Yet many faithful evangelical Christians believe that thinness and heterosexuality are godly ideals—and that God will provide reliable paths toward them for those who fall short. Seeking the Straight and Narrow is a fascinating account of the world of evangelical efforts to alter our strongest bodily desires. Drawing on fieldwork at First Place, a popular Christian weight-loss program, and Exodus International, a network of ex-gay ministries, Lynne Gerber explores why some Christians feel that being fat or gay offends God, what exactly they do to lose weight or go straight, and how they make sense of the program’s results—or, frequently, their lack. Gerber notes the differences and striking parallels between the two programs, and, more broadly, she traces the ways that other social institutions have attempted to contain the excesses associated with fatness and homosexuality. Challenging narratives that place evangelicals in constant opposition to dominant American values, Gerber shows that these programs reflect the often overlooked connection between American cultural obsessions and Christian ones.
Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment
John P. Bowles - 2011
Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they challenged viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia and discrimination and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piper’s work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is an in-depth analysis of this pioneering artist’s work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-one in color.Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art and its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kant’s philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piper’s work at the nexus of Conceptual and feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piper’s work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.
Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement
Farzaneh Milani - 2011
The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional "right" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries.Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.
Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan
Terry Glavin - 2011
of the war in Afghanistan and introduces the people whose defiant courage offers hope for the future.Far from the Taliban's grim desert strongholds, the country we visit with Terry Glavin is a surprisingly welcoming place, hidden away in alleys and narrow streets that bustle with blacksmiths, gem hawkers and spice merchants. This is the unseen Afghanistan, reawakening from decades of savagery and bloodletting.Glavin shows us how events have unfolded in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. Travelling with fluent interpreters and Afghan human rights activists, Glavin meets people from many walks of life -- key political figures, teachers, journalists, farmers, students, burqa-shrouded women and soccer players -- and in these pages they speak for themselves. And in the life story of Afghan-Canadian writer, translator and activist Abdulrahim Parwani, he finds the story of Afghanistan's agonies over the past 30 years.Celebrated as .a critical voice in the dialogue that sustains a civil society,. Glavin is a co-founder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and is increasingly seen as an expert on Canada's role in Afghanistan. He is also one of the best writers we have.
Come from the Shadows
mounts a passionately, marvellously readable challenge to the usual depiction of the war in Afghanistan. What, Glavin asks, has made the West incapable of hearing the voices of Afghans at the forefront of the global struggle against slavery, misogyny and tyranny? His answers are often unexpected and always illuminating.
Hope, Pain and Patience: The Lives of Women in South Sudan
Friederike Bubenzer - 2011
By telling the stories of many brave women through firsthand accounts, it highlights some of the tremendous challenges related to gender issues in South Sudan today; challenges such as a lack of access to education, high rates of gender-based violence, the prevalence of highly patriarchal traditions and customs, and poor health-care services resulting in the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Informative and hopeful, this book aspires to contribute to the creation of a policy framework that is in line with the vision of a democratic and peaceful South Sudan.
The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe
Tanya Horeck - 2011
Through critical discussions of key films and directors, this book sheds new light on cutting-edge debates in Film Studies regarding sexuality, violence and spectatorship, affect and ethics, and the political dimensions of extreme cinema.Including important new work from internationally renowned scholars Martin Barker and Martine Beugnet, as well as combining a range of approaches to extreme cinema across audience research and theories of spectator ship, this exploration of the darkest side of cinema will be an invaluable resource for film scholars and students.
Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play
Jenny Sund N. - 2011
It takes seriously women's passions in games, and as such draws attention to questions of pleasure in and desire for technology.The authors use a unique approach of what they term a "twin ethnography" that develops two parallel stories. Sveningsson studies "straight" game culture, and makes explicit that which is of the norm by exploring the experiences of female gamers in a male-dominated gaming context. Sund�n investigates "queer" game culture through the queer potentials of mainstream World of Warcraft culture, as well as through the case of a guild explicitly defined as LGBT.Academic research on game culture is flourishing, yet feminist accounts of gender and sexuality in games are still in the making. Drawing on feminist notions of performance, performativity and positionality, as well as the recent turn to affect and phenomenology within cultural theory, the authors develop queer, feminist studies of online player cultures in ways that are situated and embodied.
Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol
Katherine L. Meizel - 2011
Diversity is carefully highlighted and coached into a viable commodity by judges, argues Katherine Meizel, with contestants packaged into familiar portraits of American identities. Consumer choice, as expressed by audience voting, also shapes the course of the show--negotiating ideas of democracy and opportunity closely associated with the American Dream. Through interviews with audience members and participants, and careful analyses of television broadcasts, commercial recordings, and print and online media, Meizel demonstrates that commercial music and the music industry are not simply forces to be criticized or resisted, but critical sites for redefining American culture.
Black Men Worshipping: Intersecting Anxieties of Race, Gender, and Christian Embodiment
Stacy C. Boyd - 2011
Black Men Worshipping places fictive literary narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and In My Father’s House, and film narratives such as The Green Mile in dialogue with the non-fictive narratives of popular African American figures Bishop T. D. Jakes and Pastor Donnie McClurkin in an effort to provide a snapshot of the complex constellation of issues involved in black male Christian embodiment.
Masculinity in Children's Animal Stories, 1888-1928: A Critical Study of Anthropomorphic Tales by Wilde, Kipling, Potter, Grahame and Milne
Wynn William Yarbrough - 2011
This critical book examines the performance of masculinity in these stories, particularly in light of the waning years of Victoria's reign when changing historical, political and social pressures altered the definition of masculinity. An examination of aestheticism, multicultural religious and spiritual forces, and the role of genre are key to understanding how these authors scripted masculinity onto non-human character. Topics covered include the roles of violence, rebellion, escape, spirituality, social hierarchies and law. A vital addition to the scholarly examination of children's literature.
Contradictory Lives: Baul Women in India and Bangladesh
Lisa I. Knight - 2011
They wander the countryside and entertain with their passionate singing and unusual behavior, and they are especiallywell-known for their evocative songs, which challenge the caste system and sectarianism prevalent in South Asia.Although Bauls claim to value women over men, little is known about the individual views and experiences of Baul women. Based on ethnographic research in both the predominantly Hindu context of West Bengal (India) and the Muslim country of Bangladesh, this book explores the everyday lives of Baulwomen. Lisa Knight examines the contradictory expectations regarding Baul women: on the one hand, the ideal of a group unencumbered by societal restraints and concerns and, on the other, the real constraints of feminine respectability that seemingly curtail women's mobility and public performances.Knight demonstrates that Baul women respond to these conflicting expectations in various ways, sometimes adopting and other times subverting local gendered norms to craft meaningful lives. More so than their male counterparts, Baul women feel encumbered by norms. But rather than seeing Baul women'snormative behavior as indicative of their conformity to gendered roles (and, therefore, failures as Bauls), Knight argues that these women creatively draw on societal expectations to transcend their social limits and create new paths.
Supernatural Fatherhood Through Priestly Celibacy: Fulfillment In Masculinity//A Thomistic Study
Carter H. Griffin - 2011
Through the theological lens of St. Thomas Aquinas, it begins by exploring the phenomenon of paternity itself, beginning with the prime analogue of fatherhood in God and cascading into the biological, natural, and supernatural expressions of fatherhood in men. The specific supernatural fatherhood of the priest is derived from his ordination, by which he is configured to Christ the Head and becomes an instrument of Christ's fatherhood in the order of grace, exercising his ministry in the triple office of priest, prophet, and shepherd and fulfilling, within the plan of salvation, both the procreative and perfective dimensions of human paternity. By demonstrating that priestly celibacy is ordered to the exercise of this supernatural fatherhood, celibacy is shown to be not an arbitrary clerical discipline but inscribed with its own natural and supernatural logic, an effective way of generating life in the order of redemption and the normative mode of exercising priestly paternity. Throughout the work, counterarguments, particularly those proffered by feminist theologians, are considered and addressed. The concluding chapter considers some implications of this thesis in the life of the priest and in the selection and formation of candidates to the priesthood. Portions of this dissertation were incorporated into a book intended for a more popular audience from Emmaus Road Publishing entitled, "Why Celibacy?: Reclaiming the Fatherhood of the Priest" in 2019.
Habits of Being: Mormon Women's Material Culture
Elizabeth Pinborough - 2011
They are physical reminders of our ancestors’ legacies to us—identities that descend as deep as our DNA, cultural surroundings as brittle and as beautiful as fine china, and thoughts as complex as Continental philosophy.”-Elizabeth PinboroughA variety of Mormon women write about objects they have inherited from their ancestresses in this collection of essays and poetry. Humorous and heart-breaking, this collection includes works by Linda Hoffman Kimball, Jana Riess, Margaret Toscano, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought
Benjamin H. Dunning - 2011
Yet sexual difference was not completely stable as a conceptual category across the spectrum of formative Christian thinking. Rather, early Christians found ways to exercise theological creativity and to think differently from one another as they probed the enigma of sexually differentiated bodies.In Specters of Paul, Benjamin H. Dunning explores this variety in second- and third-century Christian thought with particular attention to the ways the legacy of the apostle Paul fueled, shaped, and also constrained approaches to the issue. Paul articulates his vision of what it means to be human primarily by situating human beings between two poles: creation (Adam) and resurrection (Christ). But within this framework, where does one place the figure of Eve--and the difference that her female body represents?Dunning demonstrates that this dilemma impacted a range of Christian thinkers in the centuries immediately following the apostle, including Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, and authors from the Nag Hammadi corpus. While each of these thinkers attempts to give the difference of the feminine a coherent place within a Pauline typological framework, Dunning shows that they all fail to deliver fully on the coherence that they promise. Instead, sexual difference haunts the Pauline discourse of identity and sameness as the difference that can be neither fully assimilated nor fully ejected--a conclusion with important implications not only for early Christian history but also for feminist and queer philosophy and theology.
Gender and History
Susan Kingsley Kent - 2011
Covering a broad timespan, Kent makes the origins, concepts and methods of gender history accessible to students, showing how they can use gender in their own historical studies.
Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash
Molly Dragiewicz - 2011
Dragiewicz examines the lawsuit Booth v. Hvass, in which fathers' rights groups attempted to use an Equal Protection claim to argue that funding emergency services that target battered women is discriminatory against men. As Dragiewicz shows, this case (which was eventually dismissed) is relevant to widespread efforts to promote a degendered understanding of violence against women in order to eradicate policies and programs that were designed to ameliorate harm to battered women.
Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America
Faye E. Dudden - 2011
How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this?Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.
Recreating Japanese Men
Sabine FrühstückNagano Hiroko - 2011
Recreating Japanese Men examines a broad range of attitudes regarding properly masculine pursuits and modes of behavior. It charts breakdowns in traditional and conventional societal roles and the resulting crises of masculinity. Contributors address key questions about Japanese manhood ranging from icons such as the samurai to marginal men including hermaphrodites, robots, techno-geeks, rock climbers, shop clerks, soldiers, shoguns, and more. In addition to bringing historical evidence to bear on definitions of masculinity, contributors provide fresh analyses on the ways contemporary modes and styles of masculinity have affected Japanese men’s sense of gender as authentic and stable.
World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development
World Bank Group - 2011
Women have made unprecedented gains in rights, education, health, and access to jobs and livelihoods. More countries than ever guarantee equal rights in property, marriage, and other domains. Gendergaps in primary schooling have closed in many countries, while in a third of all countries girls now outnumber boys in secondary school. And more young women than men attend universities in 60 countries. Women are using their education to participate more in the labor force: they now make up for 40 percent of the global labor force and 43 percent of its farmers. Moreover, women now live longer than men in every region of the world. Despite the progress, gaps remain in many areas. Women are more likely to die--relative to males--in many low- and middle-income countries than their counterparts in rich countries--especially in childhood and during their reproductive years. Primary and secondary school enrollments for girls remain much lower than for boys in many Sub-Saharan African countries and some parts of South Asia, as well as among disadvantaged populations. Women are more likely than men to work as unpaid family laborers or in the informal sector, to farm smaller plots and grow less profi table crops, operate in smaller fi rms and less profi table sectors, and generally earn less. Women--especially poor women--have less say over decisions and less control over household resources. And in most countries, fewer women participate in formal politics than men and are underrepresented in the upper echelons. The World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development argues that closing these persistent gender gaps matters. It matters because gender equality is a core development objective in its own right. But it is also smart economics. Greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative. Building on a growing body of knowledge on the economics of gender equality and development, the Report identifi es the areas where gender gaps are most signifi cant--both intrinsically and in terms of their potential development payoff--and where growth alone cannot solve the issues. It then sets forth four priorities for public action: - Reducing excess female mortality and closing education gaps where they remain - Improving access to economic opportunities for women - Increasing women's voice and agency in the household and in society - Limiting the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. Policies need to focus on the underlying determinants of gender gaps in each priority area. In some priority areas--such as excess female mortality in infancy and early childhood as well as in the reproductive years--improving service delivery (especially of clean water and sanitation, and maternal care) is of primary importance. For other priority areas--such as gender gaps in earnings and productivity--policies need to tackle the multiple constraints that originate in the workings of markets and institutions to limit progress. Policy makers will need to prioritize these constraints and address them simultaneously or sequentially. While domestic policies are central to reducing gender inequalities, development partners should focus on complementing these efforts in each of the four priority areas, and on supporting evidence-based public action through better data, evaluation, and learning. This will require a mix of more funding, efforts to foster innovation and learning, and broader partnerships. The funding should be directed particularly to supporting the poorest countries in reducing excess female mortality and gender gaps in education. Investments are needed to improve the availability of better gender-disaggregated data and support more experimentation and systematic evaluation. And the partnerships should involve the private sector, development agencies, and civil society organizations.
The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects
Barbara L. Voss - 2011
While archaeological studies of the historic past have explored the dynamics of European colonialism, such work has largely ignored broader issues of sexuality, embodiment, commemoration, reproduction, and sensuality. Recently, however, scholars have begun to recognize these issues as essential components of colonization and imperialism. This book explores a variety of case studies, revealing the multifaceted intersections of colonialism and sexuality. Incorporating work that ranges from Phoenician diasporic communities of the eighth century to Britain's nineteenth-century Australian penal colonies to the contemporary maroon community of Brazil, this volume changes the way we understand the relationship between sexuality and colonial history.