Best of
Womens-Studies
2021
Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film
Helen O'Hara - 2021
Early pioneers like Dorothy Arzner (who invented the boom mic, among other innovations) and Alice Guy-Blache shaped the way films are made. But it wasn't long before these talented women were pushed aside and their contributions written out of film history. How and why did this happen?Hollywood was born just over a century ago, at a time of huge forward motion for women's rights, yet it came to embody the same old sexist standards. Women found themselves fighting a system that feeds on their talent, creativity and beauty but refuses to pay them the same respect as their male contemporaries - until now...The tide has finally begun to turn. A new generation of women, both in front of and behind the camera, are making waves in the industry and are now shaping some of the biggest films to hit our screens. There is plenty of work still needed before we can even come close to gender equality in film - but we're finally headed in the right direction.In Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film, Empire's 'geek queen' Helen O'Hara takes a closer look at the pioneering and talented women of Hollywood and their work in film since Hollywood began. Equal representation in film matters because it both reflects and influences wider societal gender norms. In understanding how women were largely written out of Hollywood's own origin story, and how the films we watch are put together, we can finally see how to put an end to a picture that is so deeply unequal - and discover a multitude of stories out there just waiting to be told.
Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself
Lisa Marchiano - 2021
How to Age Without Getting Old: The Steps You Can Take Today to Stay Young for the Rest of Your Life
Joyce Meyer - 2021
Life is a journey through beautiful and varied seasons, with a dynamic cadence and full of continued discovery. Embrace each season of your life and learn to live into it fully with grace and help from Joyce Meyer, as she shows you:How to truly cast even your lifelong cares upon the LordHow to live dynamically, embracing and delighting in the journeyHow to embrace God's grace for this seasonHow to live abundantly as your body and mind changeGod's timing is always perfect, and there is a distinct and meaningful purpose for this season of your life. Joyce says, "Only a fool thinks they can always do what they have always done." How to Age Without Getting Old equips us to become wise enough to embrace God's changing grace and the evolution of our calling to the next season of life.
The Path of the Witch: Rituals Practices for Discovering Which Witch You Are
Lidia Pradas - 2021
Witchcraft is not one defined path—rather, it is a diversity of practices you can curate and align with based on your lifestyle and unique gifts. Which witch are you?Do you have an affinity for working with plants and herbs for magic and medicine? You may be a Green Witch.Is the kitchen and home space sacred to you? Are you able to tap into the sensory and healing properties of food for spellwork? Is cooking an intentional act for you? You may be a Kitchen Witch.Are you able to easily connect with the spirit world or the liminal realms? You may be a Hedge Witch.Can you do many practices with ease? You may be an Eclectic Witch.The Path of the Witchdescribes the many different types of witches, their gifts and abilities, and their practices. Each path shows readers activities and rituals that they can use to discover and explore that type of witchcraft and discern which one is the fit for them.
Savage Love from A to Z: Advice on Sex and Relationships, Dating and Mating, Exes and Extras
Dan Savage - 2021
Dan Savage has been talking frankly about sex and relationships for 30 years, and has built an international following thanks to his sex-positive Savage Love column and podcast. To celebrate this milestone comes Savage Love from A to Z, an illustrated collection of 26 never-before-published essays that provides a thoughtful, frank dive into Savage's trademark phrases and philosophies. This hardcover book is for anyone who's had sex, is currently having sex, or hopes to have sex!Essays cover a variety of topics: • B Is for Boredom • F Is for Fuck First • G Is for GGG (Good Giving Game) • M Is for MonogamishWhether he's talking about issues like compatibility or specific sex acts, you can be sure he's giving it to you straight. Short excerpts from his classic columns kick off each essay and cheeky illustrations by his longtime collaborator Joe Newton complement the topic at hand. Savage has moved the needle toward a more open discourse around sex, relationships, and intimacy, and this book will both inspire and inform his legions of fans. An ideal stocking stuffer!
Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom
Kathryn Kolbert - 2021
Roe v. Wade protected abortion rights and Planned Parenthood v. Casey unexpectedly preserved them. Yet in the following decades these rights have been gutted by restrictive state legislation, the appointment of hundreds of anti-abortion judges, and violence against abortion providers. Today, the ultra-conservative majority at the Supreme Court has activists, medical providers, and everyday Americans worry that we are about to lose our most fundamental reproductive protections.When Roe is toppled, abortion may quickly become a criminal offense in nearly one-third of the United States. At least six states have enacted bans on abortion as early as six weeks of pregnancy—before many women are even aware they are pregnant. Today, 89% of U.S. counties do not have a single abortion provider, in part due to escalating violence and intimidation aimed at disrupting services. We should all be free to make these personal and private decisions that affect our lives and wellbeing without government interference or bias, but we can no longer depend on Roe v. Wade and the federal courts to preserve our liberties.Legal titans Kathryn Kolbert and Julie F. Kay share the story of one of the most divisive issues in American politics through behind-the-scenes personal narratives of stunning losses, hard-earned victories, and moving accounts of women and health care providers at the heart of nearly five decades of legal battles. At this make-or-break moment for legal abortion in the United States, Kolbert and Kay propose audacious new strategies inspired by medical advances, state-level protections, human rights models, and activists across the globe whose courage and determination are making a difference. No more banging our heads against the Court’s marble walls. It is time for a new direction.
Hormone Intelligence: The Complete Guide to Calming Hormone Chaos and Restoring Your Body's Natural Blueprint for Well-Being
Aviva Romm - 2021
Thirty percent of women are suffering from PMS, PCOS, endometriosis, infertility, insulin resistance, thyroid problems, uterine fibroids, and breast cancer. Tens of millions of women are taking pills to alleviate pain, mood, and blood sugar disorders; birth control prescriptions for symptoms ranging from acne to autoimmune conditions; and hormone replacement medication which can have serious–even fatal–consequences. Studies have found that American girls are entering puberty much earlier—some as young as seven—than previous generations, which can have serious consequences for their long-term health. In addition, one in eight women seek fertility treatments every year. All of these are symptoms of an epidemic—hormone imbalance—that is wreaking havoc on women’s health and their lives.But women don’t have to suffer any longer. A specialist in women’s health, Dr. Aviva Romm, has developed a 6-week hormone-balancing program to heal the underlying root cause of these painful symptoms and debilitating diseases. It’s not just the female hormones estrogen and progesterone–thyroid hormones, adrenal hormones, gut balance, detoxification systems, stress response, and insulin can also be out of balance and it's up to our hormones to be the messengers. In Hormone Intelligence, Dr. Romm shows us the ways our innate wisdom about hormones has been clouded and how to get back in touch with the most powerful signaling system in your body. She lays out her program and the 6-pillars of hormone health, providing tests, tools, lifestyle changes, diet, and supplements to help every woman get her health back on track. With Hormone Intelligence women can finally be their healthiest selves and live the lives they want.
Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity
Claudia Goldin - 2021
Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed--and the barriers they faced--in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining.Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.
Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
Kate Clifford Larson - 2021
She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She wassubjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America--the right to cast a ballot--in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel--her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and herconviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party--including itsstandard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson--tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionarychange.Kate Clifford Larson's biography of Fannie Lou Hamer is the most complete ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activistsconducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer'slife, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.
The Orders Were To Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle
Meena Kandasamy - 2021
In 2012, Meena Kandasamy, who grew up with poster-size pictures of Tamil Tigers and Tigresses, decides to make a documentary on the violence faced by the female fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the aftermath of the brutal war. She meets the women who had survived the Sri Lankan camps where the orders were to rape them—women who are now refugees in distant lands, pale shadows of their blazing selves. Her documentary never gets made. But Kandasamy exhumes old hard drives to piece together their shattered lives.Kandasamy also translates and presents us the poetry of three Tamil women combatants—poetry as op-ed, poetry as resistance, poetry as a call to arms, poetry as a call to poetry.
Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation
Julie Bindel - 2021
A frontline activist in the campaign to end male violence for the last four decades, Julie Bindel is a leading voice in the feminist movement. In her fight for women's rights, she has been up against innumerable barricades, fought the enemy, hailed great successes, witnessed pivotal moments and created groundbreaking feminist theory and practice.This blistering polemic examines the way anti-feminist men, and the women who collaborate with them, have tried to push the women's liberation movement into the wilderness and how radical feminists have resisted and wrestled back the reins. In charting this history, Bindel will look clearly to the future and how younger, newer feminists can become radical again without the threat of being ostracised, bullied or ridiculed.Drawing on interviews with renowned activists, Bindel conjures a vivid image of the current state of feminism. At its heart, Feminism for Women is a complex, personal journey of how feminism has evolved over the years - and a thoughtful investigation of what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century.
Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering
Paige Bowers - 2021
She grew to be a woman who spent a lifetime educating herself, both inside and outside of the classroom, so that she could become the person and professional she aspired to be. Where some saw roadblocks, Montague only saw hurdles that needed to be overcome. Her mindset helped her become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer, using a program she worked late nights to debug. She did this as a single mother during the height of the Cold War, all the while imbuing her son with the hard-won wisdom she had accumulated throughout the years. Equal parts coming-of-age tale, civil rights history, and reflection on the power of education, Overnight Code is a tale about persistence and perseverance when the odds against you seem insurmountable.
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing
Hannah Dawson - 2021
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is a global anthology of feminist writers, edited and introduced with a major new essay by Hannah Dawson. Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, the book reaches around the earth and through the years to us, now, crashing about in the fourth wave. It goes beyond the usual white, western story, encompassing also race, class, capitalism, imperialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with patriarchy. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in Seneca Falls in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', we find Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York in 1797, who replied 'and ain't I a woman?' Deeply sensitive to the exclusions and exploitations of feminism itself, the anthology is as alive to the conflicts between women as it is to the struggle against patriarchy. Maximally inclusive, and drawing on poems, novels and memoirs, as well as roaring manifestos, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing parts the clouds on a constellation of feminist classics.
The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
Dorothy Wickenden - 2021
In Auburn, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century, Martha Wright and Frances Seward, inspired by Harriet Tubman’s rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Maryland, opened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad. Tubman was enslaved, Wright was a middle-class Quaker mother of seven, and Seward was the aristocratic wife and moral conscience of her husband, William H. Seward, who served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State. All three refused to abide by laws that denied them the rights granted to white men, and they supported each other as they worked to overturn slavery and achieve full citizenship for blacks and women. The Agitators opens when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young women bridling against their traditional roles. It ends decades later, after Wright’s and Seward’s sons—and Tubman herself—have taken part in three of the defining engagements of the Civil War. Through the sardonic and anguished accounts of the protagonists, reconstructed from their letters, diaries, and public appearances, we see the most explosive debates of the time, and portraits of the men and women whose paths they crossed: Lincoln, Seward, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. Tubman, embraced by Seward and Wright and by the radical network of reformers in western New York State, settled in Auburn and spent the second half of her life there. With extraordinarily compelling storytelling reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and David McCullough’s John Adams, The Agitators brings a vivid new perspective to the epic American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, women’s rights activism, and the Civil War.
Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community
Vanessa M. Holden - 2021
Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Daphne A. Brooks - 2021
Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
Vera Rubin: A Life
Jacqueline Mitton - 2021
Scientists are not sure what it is, but most believe it's out there, and in abundance. The astronomer who finally convinced many of them was Vera Rubin. When Rubin died in 2016, she was regarded as one of the most influential astronomers of her era. Her research on the rotation of spiral galaxies was groundbreaking, and her observations contributed significantly to the confirmation of dark matter, a most notable achievement.In Vera Rubin: A Life, prolific science writers Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton provide a detailed, accessible overview of Rubin's work, showing how she leveraged immense curiosity, profound intelligence, and novel technologies to help transform our understanding of the cosmos. But Rubin's impact was not limited to her contributions to scientific knowledge. She also helped to transform scientific practice by promoting the careers of women researchers. Not content to be an inspiration, Rubin was a mentor and a champion. She advocated for hiring women faculty, inviting women speakers to major conferences, and honoring women with awards that were historically the exclusive province of men.Rubin's papers and correspondence yield vivid insights into her life and work, as she faced down gender discrimination and met the demands of family and research throughout a long and influential career. Deftly written, with both scientific experts and general readers in mind, Vera Rubin is a portrait of a woman with insatiable curiosity about the universe who never stopped asking questions and encouraging other women to do the same.
Mission France: The True History of the Women of SOE
Kate Vigurs - 2021
The organization’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known—Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Noor Inayat Khan—others have had their stories largely overlooked. Kate Vigurs interweaves for the first time the stories of all thirty-nine female agents. Tracing their journeys from early recruitment to work undertaken in the field, to evasion from, or capture by, the Gestapo, Vigurs shows just how greatly missions varied. Some agents were more adept at parachuting. Some agents’ missions lasted for years, others’ less than a few hours. Some survived, others were murdered. By placing the women in the context of their work with the SOE and the wider war, this history reveals the true extent of the differences in their abilities and attitudes while underlining how they nonetheless shared a common mission and, ultimately, deserve recognition both collectively and individually.
SOUL DEEP: Perspectives on Race, Relationships, Social Justice, and Hope
S.M. Troye - 2021
Born, raised, and educated in the United States, the authors currently live in eight states and three countries. Despite differences in personality, lifestyle, skin color, hair texture, regional vernacular, and geographic location, they share a significant and life changing common bond—Their ethnicity.At one or more points in each woman’s life, she found herself in toxic environments teeming with an undeniable message. This language was spoken in a manner they will never forget— The language of hate.These women—mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, musicians, artists, professors, educators, and entrepreneurs share a collective, intense desire to make a difference with their truth. Personal experiences that only they can share. Experiences that are often painful, vile, confusing, hurtful, and deeply rooted not only in the fabric of who they are, but in the ongoing, systematic practices of our society and repercussions of our past – the perpetuation of exploitation, greed, denial, and a criminal sense of misguided entitlement.In this compilation of short essays and memoirs, these writers, including USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors, re-examine their hearts and minds under the microscope of racism. If you have ever felt marginalized or oppressed, their voices will enlighten and resonate with you.
Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics
Krystale E. Littlejohn - 2021
The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial. In Just Get on the Pill, a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
Sandra M. Gilbert - 2021
Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave.From its stirrings in the midcentury—when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion—to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains—including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality—they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.
Weird Women: Volume 2: 1840-1925: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers
Lisa Morton - 2021
Klinger return with another offering of overlooked masterworks from early female horror writers, including George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edith Wharton.Following the success of their acclaimed Weird Women, star anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger return with another offering of overlooked masterworks from early female horror writers. This volume once again gathers some of the most famous voices of literature—George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edith Wharton—along with chilling tales by writers who were among the bestselling and most critically-praised authors of the early supernatural story, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Vernon Lee, Florence Marryat, and Margaret Oliphant. There are, of course, ghost stories here, but also tales of vampirism, mesmerism, witches, haunted India, demonic entities, and journeys into the afterlife. Introduced and annotated for modern readers, Morton and Klinger have curated more stories sure to provide another "feast of entertaining (and scary) reads" (Library Journal).
Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz - 2021
Drawing on surveys and interviews across different Orthodox groups in London, as well as on the author's own experience of active participation over many years, this is a thoroughly researched study that analyses its findings in the context of related developments in Israel and the USA. Sympathetic attention is given to women's creativity and sophistication as they struggle to develop new modes of expression that will let their voices be heard; at the same time, the inevitable points of conflict with the male-dominated religious establishment are examined and explained. There is a focus, too, on the impact of innovations in ritual: these include not only the creation of women-only spaces and women's participation in public practices traditionally reserved for men, but also new personal practices often acquired on study visits to Israel which are replacing traditions learned from family members. This is a much-needed study of how new norms of lived religion have emerged in London, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it, and also by women's new understanding of their religious roles.
Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars: The Politics of Sex
Finn Mackay - 2021
Using queer and female masculinities as a lens, Finn Mackay investigates the current generational shift that is refusing the previous assumed fixity of sex, gender and sexual identity. Transgender and trans rights movements are currently experiencing political backlash from within certain lesbian and lesbian feminist groups, resulting in a situation in which these two minority communities are frequently pitted against one another or perceived as diametrically opposed.Uniquely, Finn Mackay approaches this debate through the context of female masculinity, butch and transmasculine lesbian masculinities. There has been increasing interest in the study of masculinity, influenced by a popular discourse around so-called 'toxic masculinity', the rise of men's rights activism and theory and critical work on Trump's America and the MeToo movement.An increasingly important topic in political science and sociological academia, this book aims to break new ground in the discussion of the politics of gender and identity.
The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago - 2021
Her works comprise a dizzying array of media from performance and installation to the glittering table laid for thirty-nine iconic women in The Dinner Party (now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), the groundbreaking Birth Project, and the meticulously researched Holocaust Project. She designed the monumental installation for Dior’s 2020 Paris couture show and, in 2019, established the Judy Chicago Portal, which will help to accomplish her lifelong goal of overcoming the erasure that has eclipsed the achievements of so many women.The Flowering is her vivid and revealing autobiography, fully illustrated with photographs of her work, as well as never-before-published personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Chicago has revised and updated her earlier, classic works with previously untold stories, fresh insights, and an extensive afterword covering the last twenty years. This powerful narrative weaves together the stories behind some of Chicago’s most significant artworks and her journey as a woman artist with the chronicles of her personal relationships and her understanding, from decades of experience and extensive research, of how misogyny, racism, and other prejudices intersect to erase the legacies of artists who are not white and male while dismissing the suffering of millions of creatures who share the planet.With the first career retrospective of her work forthcoming at the de Young Museum in 2021, Chicago reinforces her message of resilience for a new generation of artists and activists. The Flowering is an essential read for anyone interested in making change.