Best of
Gender-Studies

2013

Dear Sister: Letters From Survivors of Sexual Violence


Lisa Factora-Borchers - 2013
    You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn't your fault.At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn't . . . . Remember: it wasn't your fault.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing, which often use "experts" to explain the experience of survivors for the rest of the world. Where other books about rape weave the voices of feminists and activists together and imagine what a world without violence might look like, Dear Sister describes the reality of what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, a survivor advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.Praise for Dear Sister:"This chilling, heartbreaking, and necessary collection consists of letters from 40 artists, activists, writers, and students, who are survivors of sexual assault and here offer counsel to 'sister' survivors. Every story is shadowed by the teller’s sense of shame, brokenness, depression, and pain, but at the same time, in anticipation of the addressees’ experience of sexual assault, the letters also offer comfort, solidarity, reassurance, the possibility of healing, and testimony of survival."—Publishers Weekly"There is nothing on earth more changeful than telling our stories honestly, and listening to the stories of others with an open heart. That's especially true for survivors of sexualized violence who've been silenced by shame. These 50 brave Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence will open floodgates of memory, expose body-invasion as the most traumatic of crimes, and show victimizers the roots and damage of their acts. I'm very grateful to Lisa Factora-Borchers for editing this book, to Aishah Shahida Simmons whose foreword sets a high bar of honesty, and to all the voices in it. I think you will be, too."—Gloria SteinemLisa Factora-Borchers is a Filipina writer and editor whose work has been published in make/shift, Bitch, Left Turn, and Critical Moment.Contributors: Aaminah Shakur, Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Allison McCarthy, Amita Y. Swadhin, Amy Ernst, Ana Heaton, Andrea Harris, Angel Propps, anna Saini, Anne Averyt, annu Saini, Ashley Burczak, brownfemipower, Brooke Benoit, Denise Santomauro, Desire Vincent, Dorla Harris, "Harriet J.", Indira Allegra, Isabella Gitana-Woolf, Joan Chen, Judith Stevenson, Juliet November, Kathleen Ahern, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Marianne Kirby, Maroula Blades, Mary Zelinka, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Melissa Dey Hasbrook, Melissa G., Mia Mingus, Michelle Ovalle, Premala Matthen, Rebecca Echeverria, Renee Martin, River Willow Fagan, Sara Durnan, Sarah M. Cash, Shala Bennett, Shanna Katz, Sofia Rose Smith, Sumayyah Talibah, Sydette Harry, Birdy, Viannah E. Duncan, and Zöe Flowers.

Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation


Estelle B. Freedman - 2013
    elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. Redefining Rape tells the story of the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the United States, through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change. In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege.The long-dominant view of rape in America envisioned a brutal attack on a chaste white woman by a male stranger, usually an African American. From the early nineteenth century, advocates for women's rights and racial justice challenged this narrow definition and the sexual and political power of white men that it sustained. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, at the height of racial segregation and lynching, and amid the campaign for woman suffrage, women's rights supporters and African American activists tried to expand understandings of rape in order to gain legal protection from coercive sexual relations, assaults by white men on black women, street harassment, and the sexual abuse of children. By redefining rape, they sought to redraw the very boundaries of citizenship.Freedman narrates the victories, defeats, and limitations of these and other reform efforts. The modern civil rights and feminist movements, she points out, continue to grapple with both the insights and the dilemmas of these first campaigns to redefine rape in American law and culture.

Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran


Afsaneh Najmabadi - 2013
    In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran.Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials--which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being--grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis


Jody Raphael - 2013
    As author Jody Raphael reveals in Rape Is Rape, the more acquaintance rape is reported and taken seriously by prosecutors, judges, and juries, the louder the clamor of rape denial becomes.Through firsthand interviews with victims, medical and judicial records, social media analysis, and statistics from government agencies, Rape Is Rape exposes the tactics used by the deniers, a group that includes conservatives and right-wing Christians as well as some controversial feminists. The personal stories of young acquaintance rape victims whom Raphael interviewed demonstrate how assaults on their credibility, buttressed by claims of low prevalence, prevent many from holding their rapists accountable, enabling them to rape others with impunity.Rape Is Rape is an exposé of those using rape denial to further their political agendas, and it is a call to action to protect the rights of women and girls, making it safe for victims to come forward, and end the acquaintance rape crisis. A resources section is included for those seeking help, advice, or hoping to get involved.

Glass Armonica: Poems


Rebecca Dunham - 2013
    Just as its song—which was once thought to induce insanity—wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female “hysterics” and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed patient Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica’s rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact—of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric’s “locked jaws.” Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunham’s stunning third collection is “lush yet septic” (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

The Transgender Studies Reader 1&2 Bundle


Susan Stryker - 2013
    First collected in Routledge's own The Transgender Studies Reader in 2006, the field has moved on, rapidly expanding in many directions. The Transgender Studies Reader 2 gathers these disparate strands of scholarship, and collects them into a format that makes sense for teaching and research. Complimenting the first volume, rather than competing with it, the second volume introduces another 50 articles, with explanatory head notes for each essay, and bibliographic suggestions for further reading.Buy the two volumes together at a discount in this bundle, and enjoy both the historic and modern takes on this rapidly growing, vibrant field.

Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America


Catherine A. Brekus - 2013
    Remarkably, the memoir she created that year survives today, as do more than two thousand additional pages she composed over the following three decades. Sarah Osborn's World is the first book to mine this remarkable woman’s prolific personal and spiritual record. Catherine Brekus recovers the largely forgotten story of Sarah Osborn's life as one of the most charismatic female religious leaders of her time, while also connecting her captivating story to the rising evangelical movement in eighteenth-century America.A schoolteacher in Rhode Island, a wife, and a mother, Sarah Osborn led a remarkable revival in the 1760s that brought hundreds of people, including many slaves, to her house each week. Her extensive written record—encompassing issues ranging from the desire to be "born again" to a suspicion of capitalism—provides a unique vantage point from which to view the emergence of evangelicalism. Brekus sets Sarah Osborn's experience in the context of her revivalist era and expands our understanding of the birth of the evangelical movement—a movement that transformed Protestantism in the decades before the American Revolution.

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II


Farah Jasmine Griffin - 2013
    Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood’s diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America’s promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era.In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren’t native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Café Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she débuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies—a first for a female African American author.A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit


Marlon M. Bailey - 2013
    Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community.

Unthinkable: The Shocking Scandal of Britain's Trafficked Children


Kris Hollington - 2013
    Yet many childcare experts reckon these crimes are just the tip of an iceberg of wide scale exploitation occurring across the country. The Deputy Children's Commissioner Sue Berelowitz said in June 2012 that there 'isn't a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited'. As this book goes to press, a gang of men similar to those convicted in Rochdale stands trial for similar crimes in Oxford. What is happening in Britain that means young vulnerable girls can be exploited in this way? Award-winning journalist Kris Hollington tells the inside story of some of the most shocking and heartbreaking crimes of recent years, focusing on the Rochdale case but also analysing recent cases in the London area that have echoes of the brutality of organised slavery. His findings expose how the British justice system is failing to protect children in the 21st century. It is a scandal that cannot be ignored.

Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism


Andrea D'Atri - 2013
    Using the concrete struggles of women, the Marxist feminist Andrea D'Atri traces the history of the women's and workers' movement from the French Revolution to Queer Theory. She analyzes the divergent paths feminists have woven for their liberation from oppression and uncovers where they have hit dead ends. With the global working class made up of a disproportionate number of women, women are central in leading the charge for the next revolution and laying down blueprints for an alternative future. D’Atri makes a fiery plea for dismantling capitalist patriarchy.

Mormon Women Have Their Say: Essays from the Claremont Oral History Collection


Claudia L. Bushman - 2013
    These interviews record the experiences of these women in their homes and family life, their church life, and their work life, in their roles as homemakers, students, missionaries, career women, single women, converts, and disaffected members. Their stories feed into and illuminate the broader narrative of LDS history and belief, filling in a large gap in Mormon history that has often neglected the lived experiences of women. This project preserves and perpetuates their voices and memories, allowing them to say share what has too often been left unspoken. The silent majority speaks in these records.This volume is the first to explore the riches of the collection in print. A group of young scholars and others have used the interviews to better understand what Mormonism means to these women and what women mean for Mormonism. They explore those interviews through the lenses of history, doctrine, mythology, feminist theory, personal experience, and current events to help us understand what these women have to say about their own faith and lives.

Get Out of My Crotch: Twenty-One Writers Respond to America's War on Women's Rights and Reproductive Health


Kim WyattElissa Bassist - 2013
    Using legislation, language, and women’s own silence, it seeks to return us to a time when choice and self-determination were not options.In this collection, twenty-one fearless writers examine reproductive rights, access to health care, violence against women, and the rise of rape apologists in the twenty-first-century United States. Illuminating intersections of gender, class, and race, these stories speak to the challenges women routinely face, the attempts to undermine their rights, and the deliberate, systemic erosion of their agency and existence as equals.It’s time to revisit what’s at stake, what could still be lost, and why we must continually fight for equality and freedom for all.Featuring:Roxane Gay • Betty MacDonald • Katha Pollitt • Dolores P • Sari Botton • Addy Robinson McCulloch •Tara Murtha • Sarah Mirk • Kari O'Driscoll • Martha Bayne • Janet Frishberg • Mira Ptacin • J. Victoria Sanders • s.e. smith • Camille Hayes • Rebecca K. O' Connor • Lidia Yuknavitch • Elissa Bassist • Kevin Sampsell • Kate Sheppard • Rebecca Cohen

That's So Gay!: Microaggressions and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community


Kevin L. Nadal - 2013
    Microaggressions are commonplace interactions that occur in a wide variety of social settings, including school or the workplace, among friends and family, and even among other LGBT people. These accumulated experiences are associated with feelings of victimization, suicidal thinking, and higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and other health problems among members of the LGBT community. In this book, Kevin Nadal provides a thought-provoking review of the literature on discrimination and microaggressions toward LGBT people. The generous use of case examples makes the book ideal for gender studies courses and discussion groups. Each case is followed by analysis of the elements involved in microaggressions and discussion questions for the reader to reflect upon.This book includes advice for mental health practitioners, organizational leaders, educators, and students who want to adopt LGBT-accepting worldviews and practices. It has tips for how to discuss and advocate for LGBT issues in the realms of family, community, educational systems, and the government.

The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order


Kate Eichhorn - 2013
    These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism. The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections. Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations.A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada


Emily Van Der Meulen - 2013
    Instead, it is often criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized across the socio-political spectrum by everyone from politicians to journalists to women's groups. In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced, balanced, and realistic view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices -- including researchers, feminists, academics, and advocates, as well as sex workers of differing ages, genders, and sectors -- to engage in a dialogue that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding the sex industry and advances the idea that sex work is in fact work. Presenting a variety of opinions and perspectives on such diverse topics as social stigma, police violence, labour organizing, anti-prostitution feminism, human trafficking, and harm reduction, Selling Sex is an eye-opening, challenging, and necessary book.

Sex + Faith: Talking with Your Child from Birth to Adolescence


Kate M. Ott - 2013
    Section one explains how faith relates to sexuality and the essential role parents play in forming healthy, faithful, sexual children . The second section designates a chapter for four age groupings of children from infancy through high school. Each chapter explains the biological and developmental issues of the age, answers questions children tend to have, provides relevant Biblical and faith stories helpful to discuss with children of that age, and lists five to ten key educational issues for parents to keep in mind. Shaded text boxes are interspersed throughout the book with real life, practical questions that parents and children ask. Expertly written by Kate Ott, Sex + Faith is an easy to use reference guide for parents of kids of all ages.

1 in 3: These Are Our Stories


Advocates for Youth - 2013
    The 1 in 3 Campaign is about ending the cultural stigma and shame women are made to feel around abortion. By sharing stories, we can empower others to end their silence and encourage all supporters of abortion access to publicly take a stand. The 1 in 3 Campaign is a project of Advocates for Youth.

I Am Subject: Sharing Our Truths to Reclaim Our Selves


Diane DeBella - 2013
    Simply knowing that others have struggled can bring women out of isolated suffering to a deeper sense of awareness and understanding. Our early interpersonal relationships, combined with the societal and cultural messages we receive, influence all of our subsequent actions, including our sexual experiences, our intimate relationships, our decision to have children or not have children, our career choices, and our tendency to deal with life’s challenges either constructively or destructively. I Am Subject provides a safe space for women to increase their awareness regarding where they have come from and where they are going as they move forward into the next stages of their lives. It is my hope that those who read these words will sit with them, give thought to how they might apply to their own lives and the lives of women they know, and begin their own conversations regarding how to best turn increased awareness into action.

Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia


Manduhai Buyandelger - 2013
    Economic shock therapy—an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets—quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it—the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression. Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe


Judith M. Bennett - 2013
    The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium.The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and it not only serves as the major reference text in medieval and gender studies, but also provides an agenda for future new research.

Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa: Rethinking Homophobia and Forging Resistance


Marc Epprecht - 2013
    Gay-bashing by high political and religious figures in Zimbabwe and Gambia; draconian new laws against lesbians and gays and their supporters in Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda; the imprisonment and extortion of gay men in Senegal and Cameroon; and so-called corrective rapes of lesbians in South Africa have all rightly sparked international condemnation. However, much of the analysis thus far has been highly critical of African leadership and culture without considering local nuances, historical factors and external influences that are contributing to the problem. Such commentary also overlooks grounds for optimism in the struggle for sexual rights and justice in Africa, not just for sexual minorities but for the majority population as well. Based on pioneering research on the history of homosexualities and engagement with current lgbti and HIV/AIDS activism, Mark Epprecht provides a sympathetic overview of the issues at play, and a hopeful outlook on the potential of sexual rights for all.

Queenship in Medieval Europe


Theresa Earenfight - 2013
    Linked to kings by marriage, family, and property, queens were vital to the institution of monarchy.In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to the study of queenship, Theresa Earenfight documents the lives and works of queens and empresses across Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The book:* introduces pivotal research and sources in queenship studies, and includes exciting and innovative new archival research* highlights four crucial moments across the full span of the Middle Ages – ca. 300, 700, 1100, and 1350 – when Christianity, education, lineage, and marriage law fundamentally altered the practice of queenship* examines theories and practices of queenship in the context of wider issues of gender, authority, and power.This is an invaluable and illuminating text for students, scholars and other readers interested in the role of royal women in medieval society.

Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson


Blake Bailey - 2013
    Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend—the story of five disastrous days in the life of alcoholic Don Birnam—was published in 1944 to triumphant success. Within five years it had sold nearly half a million copies in various editions, and was added to the prestigious Modern Library. The actor Ray Milland, who would win an Oscar for his portrayal of Birnam, was coached in the ways of drunkenness by the novel’s author—a balding, impeccably groomed middle-aged man who had been sober since 1936 and had no intention of going down in history as the author of a thinly veiled autobiography about a crypto-homosexual drunk. But The Lost Weekend was all but entirely based on Jackson’s own experiences, and Jackson’s valiant struggles fill these pages. He and his handsome gay brother, Fred (“Boom”), grew up in the scandal-plagued village of Newark, New York, and later lived in Europe as TB patients, consorting with aristocratic café society. Jackson went on to work in radio and Hollywood, was published widely, lived in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and knew everyone from Judy Garland and Billy Wilder to Thomas Mann and Mary McCarthy. A doting family man with two daughters, Jackson was often industrious and sober; he even became a celebrated spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet he ultimately found it nearly impossible to write without the stimulus of pills or alcohol and felt his devotion to his work was worth the price. Rich with incident and character, Farther & Wilder is the moving story of an artist whose commitment to bringing forbidden subjects into the popular discourse was far ahead of his time.

Race and Gender in the Classroom: Teachers, Privilege, and Enduring Social Inequalities


Laurie Cooper Stoll - 2013
    In particular, this book illuminates the obstacles that mitigate the potential for teachers to serve as social justice advocates in the classroom by connecting teachers' behaviors and attitudes to the institutional complexes in which they participate

Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition


Ayesha S. Chaudhry - 2013
    Especially contentious is passage 4:34, which covers the legitimacy of marital violence and the subjugation of women within Islam. Scholarly opinion on the topic is heavily influenced by contemporary context, so the issue remains largely unsettled. While pre-colonial Islamic jurists permitted the use of violence against women, they still held ethical concerns about the disciplinary privileges of husbands. Consequently, the debate for these early scholars was focussed on the level of violence permitted, and how to apply the three disciplinary steps: admonishment, abandonment, and physical abuse.Ayesha Chaudhry argues that all living religious traditions are rooted in a patriarchal, social, and historical context, and they need ways to reconcile gender egalitarian values with religious tradition. Post-colonial, modern Islamic scholars that consult the Qur'an for gender-egalitarian interpretations must confront a difficult and unique debate: equality vs authority. As in many religions, authority is derived from tradition, rebelling from which results in a loss of authority in the eyes of the community.Chaudhry reveals that Muslims do not speak with one voice about Islam. Instead, Muslim scholarly discourse is spirited and diverse. The voices of contemporary Muslim scholars enrich the scope of the 'Islamic tradition'.Many recent works on Islam strive to promote a 'public relations' image of Islam. This book deals with ethical problems of domestic violence as discussed in historic and contemporary Islamic religious doctrine. The stakes are high, and very real. The author confronts the significant issue of how modern Muslims can relate to Islamic tradition and the Qur'anic text.

A Question of Choice: Roe V. Wade


Sarah Weddington - 2013
    Bill ClintonA milestone. . . . Here she recounts with clarity and fervor the remarkable story of how she, her husband and a few other lawyers, supported by a handful of doctors and pro-choice advocates, researched and prepared briefs invoking the 'right of privacy' defense as a main argument to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law. Publishers WeeklyOn the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, women's reproductive freedom is just as contested as it was before abortion was made legal. Adding a new chapter to her celebrated book about the story behind that great legal challenge, Sarah Weddington brings up-to-date the status of choice and constitutional law.Sarah Weddington is an attorney and lecturer from Austin Texas. She became a key figure in the reproductive rights movement when at the age of twenty-seven she successfully argued Roe v. Wade, the landmark court case that gave American women the right to abortion. She has served in the Texas house of representatives, and was a White House advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Weddington travels the country, lecturing on leadership and women's issues.

Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy


Nicholas Terpstra - 2013
    Nicholas Terpstra shows that gender was the key factor driving innovation. Most of the recipients of charity were women. The most creative new plans focused on features of women s poverty like illegitimate births, hunger, unemployment, and domestic violence. Signal features of the reforms, from forced labor to new instruments of saving and lending, were devised specifically to help young women get a start in life."Cultures of Charity" is the first book to see women s poverty as the key factor driving changes to poor relief. These changes generated intense political debates as proponents of republican democracy challenged more elitist and authoritarian forms of government emerging at the time. Should taxes fund poor relief? Could forced labor help build local industry? Focusing on Bologna, Terpstra looks at how these fights around politics and gender generated pioneering forms of poor relief, including early examples of maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and credit union savings plans."

Seriously!: Investigating Crashes and Crises as If Women Mattered


Cynthia Enloe - 2013
    Each case study highlights the gritty experiences of women in diverse circumstances—in banks, on the job market, in war zones, and in revolutions. The results of taking women seriously are fresh insights into what fuels the cultures of hyper–risk taking, of sexual harassment, and the denial of women’s post-war security.

A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner


Steven Bednarski - 2013
    As Bednarski points out, the story is important not so much for what it tells us about Margarida but for how it illuminates a past world. Through the depositions and accusations made in court, the reader learns much about medieval women, female agency, kin networks, solidarity, sex, sickness, medicine, and law. Unlike most histories, this book does not remove the author from the analysis. Rather, it lays bare the working methods of the historian. Throughout his tale, Bednarski skillfully weaves a second narrative about how historians "do" history, highlighting the rewards and pitfalls of working with primary sources.The book opens with a chapter on microhistory as a genre and explains its strengths, weaknesses, and inherent risks. Next is a narrative of Margarida's criminal trial, followed by chapters on the civil suits and appeal and Margarida's eventual fate. The book features a rough copy of a court notary, a notorial act, and a sample of a criminal inquest record in the original Latin. A timeline of Margarida's life, list of characters, and two family trees provide useful information on key people in the story. A map of late medieval Manosque is also provided.

Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars


Kristin Lieb - 2013
    Stars -- and the industry power brokers who make their fortunes -- have learned to prioritize sexual attractiveness over talent as they fight a crowded field for movie deals, magazine covers, and fashion lines, let alone record deals. This focus on the female pop star s body as her core asset has resigned many women to being "short term brands," positioned to earn as much money as possible before burning out or aging ungracefully. This book, which includes interview data from music industry insiders, explores the sociological forces that drive women into these tired representations, and the ramifications on the greater social world.This book is for Sociology of Media and Sociology of Popular Culture courses.

Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Pro-Feminist Men's Movement


Rob A. Okun - 2013
    Through thematically arranged essays by leading experts, Voice Male illustrates how a growing movement of men is redefining masculinity. In this collection, Rob Okun directs a chorus of pro-feminist voices, introducing readers to men examining contemporary manhood from a variety of perspectives: from overcoming violence, fatherhood, and navigating life as a man of color, a gay man, or a boy on the journey to manhood. It also provides a critical forum for both male survivors and GBTQ men to speak out. This inspired book is evidence of a new direction for men, brightly illuminating what’s around the bend on the path to gender justice.

The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution


Matt Richardson - 2013
    It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget.Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies-—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson-—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.

The Routledge Companion to Media & Gender


Cynthia Carter - 2013
    The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender is an essential guide to the central ideas, concepts and debates currently shaping media and gender research.

The Masculine Civilization


Rene Hirsch - 2013
    At first, they used spirits to secure for themselves a function in a natural world that seemed to have taken sides with the feminine. Eventually, they created an all-mighty divinity that established their status as second to none other than that highest of all authority.Sailing through human history, we show that the way men and women have perceived procreation has determined how they position themselves in the universe. It has wielded a deep and decisive influence on the course of events. Gender and nature form a leitmotif around which the masculine civilization has been built, from the holistic vision of an all-encompassing natural world to the subjection of nature and woman, Mother Nature as the source of all life being replaced by God the Father who now sits at the summit of the creation. We finally emphasize why the current shift in perspective – instigated by the social and economic resurgence of women and by a new attitude towards nature that needs to be protected from our own deeds – represents a turning point in our history.

Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis


Charles Freeland - 2013
    Lacan himself embraced the term anti-philosophy in characterizing his work, and yet his seminars undeniably evince rich engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. These essays explore how Lacan's work challenges and builds on this tradition of ethical and political thought, connecting his ethics of psychoanalysis to both the classical Greek tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to the Enlightenment tradition of Kant, Hegel, and de Sade. Charles Freeland shows how Lacan critically addressed some of the key ethical concerns of those traditions: the pursuit of truth and the ethical good, the ideals of self-knowledge and the care of the soul, and the relation of moral law to the tragic dimensions of death and desire. Rather than sustaining the characterization of Lacan's work as anti-philosophical, these essays identify a resonance capable of enriching philosophy by opening it to wider and evermore challenging perspectives.

Fashion and Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life


Julia Twigg - 2013
    Older women in particular have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles. But increasingly there are signs of change, as older women aspire to younger, more mainstream, styles, and retailers realize the potential of the 'grey market'.Fashion and Age is the first study to systematically explore the links between clothing and age, drawing on fashion theory and cultural gerontology to examine the changing ways in which age is imagined, experienced and understood in modern culture through the medium of dress. Clothes lie between the body and its social expression, and the book explores the significance of embodiment in dress and in the cultural constitution of age.Drawing on the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers, it aims to widen the agenda of fashion studies to encompass the everyday dress of the majority, shifting the debate about age away from its current preoccupation with dependency, towards a fuller account of the lived experience of age. Fashion and Age will be of great interest to students of fashion, material culture, sociology, sociology of age, history of dress and to clothing designers.

Gender in Communication: A Critical Introduction


Victoria Pruin DeFrancisco - 2013
    Revision of the author's Communicating gender diversity: a critical approach, published in 2007.

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917


Gretchen Soderlund - 2013
    By tracing the history of high-profile print exposés on sex trafficking by journalists like William T. Stead and George Kibbe Turner, Soderlund demonstrates how controversies over gender, race, and sexuality were central to the shift from sensationalism to objectivity—and crucial to the development of journalism in the early twentieth century.

Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia


Rachel Rinaldo - 2013
    Through a vivid ethnography of Muslim and secular women activists in Jakarta, Indonesia, Rachel Rinaldo shows that this is not always the case. Examining a feminist NGO, Muslim women's organizations, and a Muslim political party, Rinaldo reveals that democratization and the Islamic revival in Indonesia are shaping new forms of personal and political agency for women. These unexpected kinds of agency draw on different approaches to interpreting religious texts and facilitate different repertoires of collective action - one oriented toward rights and equality, the other toward more public moral regulation. As Islam becomes a primary source of meaning and identity in Indonesia, some women activists draw on Islam to argue for women's empowerment and equality, while others use Islam to advocate for a more Islamic nation. Mobilizing Piety demonstrates that religious and feminist agency can coexist and even overlap, often in creative ways. "Rachel Rinaldo gives us a richly documented and path-breaking study of how Muslim women in Indonesia draw on both Islam and feminism to argue and imagine political and social changes. Her findings go against a pervasive view of the incompatibility of Islam and feminism: she finds that these very diverse global discourses can in fact work together towards desirable political outcomes."-Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, and author of A Sociology of Globalization "This original study conducted in the world's largest Muslim-majority country strikes me as one of the most interesting and important works on Islam and women in recent years. Rather than pit secularists against religious-minded activists in debates over women's rights, Rachel Rinaldo shows that the major divide in contemporary Indonesia - as in much of the Muslim world - is more complex, and centers on struggles over what it means to be a Muslim, a woman, and an Indonesian."-Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology, Boston University

The Penetrated Male


Jonathan Kemp - 2013
    Deconstructing the penetrated male body and the genderisation of its representation, The Penetrated Male offers new understandings of passivity, suggesting that the modern masculine subject is predicated on a penetrability it must always disavow. Arguing that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought, it is an important contribution to queer theory and our understandings of gendered bodies.

Women Serial Killers Through Time: 4 Books in 1


Sylvia Perrini - 2013
    IT INCLUDES: WSK OF THE 17th CENTURY WOMEN MURDERERS OF THE 18th CENTURY WSK OF THE 19th CENTURY WSK OF THE 20th CENTURY Our society can barely account for evil in males, let alone imagine it in females. The female nests, creates, and nurtures doesn't she or is it that we just want to believe in the intrinsic non-threatening nature of women? Yet, history is full of instrumentally violent women: women who have fought wars and battles throughout the world, with no less ferociousness than men, women such as Dynamis of Bosphorous, who starved her husband to death and took control of his kingdom, or Artemisia, the queen of Halicarnassus in the 5th century, who conducted a brilliant but brutal military campaign against the Greeks. Mary Tudor, Queen Mary 1 of England, in 1553 became known as "Bloody Mary," for her extreme cruelty and willingness to execute people. In modern times, women such as Madame Mao of China (1914-1991) the wife of Mao Tse-tung, who it is believed was the driving force behind the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of which she was the Deputy Director. During this 10-year period, intellectuals were imprisoned and many Eastern and Western sources have estimated the death toll from 1966-1969 alone to be around 500,000. Leaders such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and the United States Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are all equally as ruthless as their male counterparts. A grave misconception is that female serial killers are rare creatures, that they are not very common, a myth perpetuated by both the press and popular media. Women Serial Killers are not a phenomenon unique to the late twentieth century, nor are they exclusive to America. The case histories of the killers mentioned in these books clearly demonstrate that women serial killers have been active in many countries and for many centuries.

Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex


Lynne Huffer - 2013
    She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual difference.Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience.

Infinite Crab Meats


Byron Crawford - 2013
    An all you can eat buffet of probing, insightful hip-hop journalism, with thoughts on Rick Ross, Kreayshawn, Das Racist, Odd Future, El-P, Killer Mike, Chief Keef, Rap Genius and music publications Pitchfork, SPIN and XXL.