Book picks similar to
Gendering Bodies by Sara L. Crawley


academic-1
women-s-studies
feminism--gender-and-queer-studies
gender

Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free


Wednesday Martin - 2018
    Blending personal stories from Martin's own history with accessible social science, cultural theory, and interviews with sex researchers, psychologists, primatologists, anthropologists, and real women from all walks of life, she reveals startling insights about female sexuality.

Gender Neutral Parenting: Raising Kids with the Freedom to Be Themselves


Paige Lucas-Stannard - 2013
    But what about kids who fall outside the boundaries of prescribed roles? This book is a guide for parents in the practical application of Gender Neutral Parenting - a parenting style based on respect for a child's self-identity and providing latitude in exploring their own version of gender and gender expressions. In Gender Neutral Parenting you'll learn the Five Skills Essential for GNP:Skill #1: Become Aware of GenderizationSkill #2: Become Aware of Your Gender BiasSkill #3: Create a Gender Diverse EnvironmentSkill #4: Start a Dialog About GenderSkill #5: Dealing With Family and Friends and Dispelling MythsWith practical examples and real world scenarios, this book will give you the strong foundation needed to implement GNP in your home and with your children. You'll learn about gender stereotypes for boys and girls and how to counteract them as a parent. Stereotypes covered include;Girl Genderization Stereotypes:Stereotype: Girls Are More Social and Less PhysicalStereotype: Girls Are PrincessesStereotype: Girls Are Boy Crazy, Sexual TemptressesStereotype: Girls Are Pure and VirginalBoy Genderization Stereotypes:Stereotype: Boys Are Physically Active But Behind Socially and VerballyStereotype: Boys Are Emotionally StuntedStereotype: Boys Are Slaves To Their Sex DriveStereotype: Boys Will Be BoysYou'll also learn how to deal with family and friends (and strangers) that don't understand your parenting approach. I'll answer questions like;“Are you trying to make her androgynous?”“Won’t that make him gay?”“Why are you so anti-feminine/anti-masculine?”“Do you think she’s trans*?”“You’re raising a person not a social experiment.”“She’s going to hate you and need therapy.” Or, “He’ll be bullied.”“I can’t believe you let her play with Barbies! Don’t you even care about her future?”This book is for any parent, grandparent, or childcare teacher that wants a guide to raising kids without the strict limitations of gender roles and who wants to engage kids in conversations that will make them savvy media consumers and critical problem solvers around issues or gender and equality.

Her Best-Kept Secret: Inside the Private Lives of Women Who Drink


Gabrielle Glaser - 2013
    One note said, "One bottle for you, one to share." Why, Glaser wondered, would she drink a bottle of wine by herself? She was nursing, for God's sake. But alcohol—and wine, in particular—is an acceptable, legal way for women to muscle through their lives, whether they are postfeminist breadwinners or stay-at-home mothers. It's a drug women can respectfully use in public and in private, even if it carries the risk of taking them under.Women of all ages are drinking more, while men's alcohol use is staying the same. They are hitting the bottle to ease pressure from work, the stress of teething toddlers, the anxiety of trying teenagers, and the guilt of aging, faraway parents. Young women pound shots of tequila; women in their thirties, forties, and fifties guzzle secret bottles of wine as they cook dinner; and even senior citizens say they regularly down more than four drinks at one sitting several times a month. Between 1992 and 2007, the number of middle-aged women who entered alcohol treatment programs nearly tripled. In this book, Glaser investigates the problem and traces the history of women and alcohol in America, leading up to today when, for the first time, women are beginning to question the common prescription for abuse: AA.Glaser shows how this problem is beginning to be aired in public, just as a new kind of treatment tailored to women’s bodies and psyches is taking hold. Her Best-Kept Secret is a meticulously researched, eye-opening look into an ever-growing affliction that cannot be ignored.

As a Woman: What I Learned about Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy after I Transitioned


Paula Stone Williams - 2021
    Dickson, director of Faith Based Initiatives, Biden Campaign)—perfect for fans of Redefining Realness and There Is Room for You.As a father of three, married to a wonderful woman, and holding several prominent jobs within the Christian community, Dr. Paula Stone Williams made the life-changing decision to physically transition from male to female at the age of sixty. Almost instantly, her power and influence in the evangelical world disappeared and her family had to grapple with intense feelings of loss and confusion. Feeling utterly alone after being expelled from the evangelical churches she had once spearheaded, Paula struggled to create a new safe space for herself where she could reconcile her faith, her identity, and her desire to be a leader. Much to her surprise, the key to her new career as a woman came with a deeper awareness of the inequities she had overlooked before her transition. Where her opinions were once celebrated and amplified, now she found herself sidelined and ignored. New questions emerged. Why are women’s opinions devalued in favor of men’s? Why does love and intimacy feel so different? And, was it possible to find a new spirituality in her own image? In As a Woman, Paula’s “critical questions about gender, personhood, and place are relevant to anyone. Her writing insightfully reveals aspects of our gender socialization and culture that often go unexamined, but that need to be talked about, challenged, and changed” (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her) in order to fully understand what it means to be male, female, and simply, human.

Females


Andrea Long Chu - 2019
    What one does with this desire is what we call gender." So begins Andrea Long Chu's investigation into gender and desire, females and bodies, radical dreams and philosophical pessimism, and feminism as a form of political suicide. Feminism, Chu argues, is an untenable claim, and "when you make an untenable claim, your desire is showing, like a shy tattoo peeking out from a sleeve." Written in a series of linked theses, this is a provocative and searching text from our most exciting new public intellectual, a self described "sad trans girl in Brooklyn." Chu wears her heart on her sleeve with wit, style, and a manic searching grace.

Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church


Uta Ranke-Heinemann - 1988
    This international bestseller--condemned by New York's Cardinal O'Connor who, without reading it, likened it to "scrawling dirty words about the church on bathroom walls"--is a definitive, richly documented report on the oppression of women and sexuality in the Catholic Church.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals


Saidiya Hartman - 1997
    Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

The Transgender Guidebook: Keys to a Successful Transition


Anne L. Boedecker - 2011
    It is a wise and practical guide for any transgender person considering or embarking on a gender transition. It covers everything from the beginning stages of exploration and planning through the process of transformation to life after transition. This is the first book written by an experienced professional specifically for transgender clients. It will also be of interest to family, friends, allies, clergy, teachers, helping professionals and anyone who cares about the challenges faced by those who seek to change their physical appearance to match their gender identity.

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination


Sarah Schulman - 2012
    Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution


Shiri Eisner - 2013
    In this forward-thinking and eye-opening book, feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist Shiri Eisner takes readers on a journey through the many aspects of the meanings and politics of bisexuality, specifically highlighting how bisexuality can open up new and exciting ways of challenging social convention.Informed by feminist, transgender, and queer theory, as well as politics and activism, Bi is a radical manifesto for a group that has been too frequently silenced, erased, and denied—and a starting point from which to launch a bisexual revolution.

Abortion & Life


Jennifer Baumgardner - 2008
    . . and will shape the next hundred years of politics and culture.”—The Commonwealth Club of California, hailing Baumgardner as one of Six Visionaries for the Twenty-First Century“If Jennifer Baumgardner ever needs another mom, I’ll be the first in line to adopt her. She’s smart, fearless, and a formidable force for change.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and DimedIn Abortion & Life, author and activist Jennifer Baumgardner reveals how the most controversial and stigmatized Supreme Court decision of our time cuts across eras, classes, and race. Stunning portraits by photographer Tara Todras-Whitehill of folk singer Ani DiFranco, authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Gloria Steinem, and others accompany their elucidating accounts of their own abortion experiences.In this bold new work, Baumgardner explores some of the thorniest issues around terminating a pregnancy, including the ones that the pro-choice establishment has been the least sensitive or effective in confronting.Jennifer Baumgardner is the producer/creator of the award-winning film I Had an Abortion. She is the co-author (with Amy Richards) of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her most recent book is Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (FSG, 2007). She writes regularly for women’s magazines like Glamour, Elle, and Allure, as well as more political outlets such as The Nation, Harper’s, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She lives in New York City.

Rad American Women A-Z: Rebels, Trailblazers, and Visionaries who Shaped Our History . . . and Our Future!


Kate Schatz - 2015
    The perfect gift for the junior riot grrl in your life."--Bust Magazine"The History of Feminism--in an Awesome Picture Book. The ABCs just got a major girl-power upgrade."--Chantal Strasburger, Teen VogueLike all A-Z books, this one illustrates the alphabet—but instead of "A is for Apple", A is for Angela—as in Angela Davis, the iconic political activist. B is for Billie Jean King, who shattered the glass ceiling of sports; C is for Carol Burnett, who defied assumptions about women in comedy; D is for Dolores Huerta, who organized farmworkers; and E is for Ella Baker, who mentored Dr. Martin Luther King and helped shape the Civil Rights Movement.And the list of great women continues, spanning several centuries, multiple professions, and 26 diverse individuals. There are artists and abolitionists, scientists and suffragettes, rock stars and rabble-rousers, and agents of change of all kinds.The book includes an introduction that discusses what it means to be "rad" and "radical," an afterword with 26 suggestions for how you can be "rad," and a Resource Guide with ideas for further learning and reading.American history was made by countless rad—and often radical—women. By offering a fresh and diverse array of female role models, we can remind readers that there are many places to find inspiration, and that being smart and strong and brave is rad.Rad American Women will be appreciated by various age groups. It is Common Core aligned for students grades 3 - 8. Pre-school and young children will be captured by the bright visuals and easily modified texts, while the subject matter will stimulate and inspire high-schoolers and beyond."This is not a book. This is a guest list for a party of my heroes. Thank you for inviting us." —Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events books"I feel honored to be included in this book. Women need to take radical steps to become feminists, and to be strong to fight for their rights and those of others facing oppression and discrimination. The world needs rad women to create a just society." —Dolores Huerta, Labor Leader, Civil Rights Activist"It's almost always with a chuckle that I view a cartoon image of myself. But to see cartoon-me positioned (alphabetically) amongst so many of my women heroes and role models . . . well, I just broke down and cried. Happy tears. I surely hope that this one-of-a-kind collection of radical American women reaches the hands of all children who want to grow up and become amazing women." —Kate Bornstein, author of My New Gender Workbook"I was totally in rapture reading this book. Bold women, bold colors, and fierce black paper cutouts. I cheer these histories of women who fight not for war or country or corporation, but for EVERYONE! I can't wait for my son to read this." —Nikki McClure, Illustrator of All in a Day

Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World


Kathleen Ragan - 1998
    Gathered from around the world, from regions as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe, from North and South American Indian cultures and New World settlers, from Asia and the Middle East, these 100 folktales celebrate strong female heroines.Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters is for all women who are searching to define who they are, to redefine the world and shape their collective sensibility. It is for men who want to know more about what it means to be a woman. It is for our daughters and our sons, so that they can learn to value all kinds of courage, courage in battle and the courage of love. It is for all of us to help build a more just vision of woman.

Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine


Michele Lent Hirsch - 2018
    She did.Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers.For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar.Author Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn't be the only woman who's faced serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population with important stories to tell.Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system--a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible.And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood.Lent Hirsch weaves her own harrowing experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.

The Vagina Monologues


Eve Ensler - 1996
    They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one's ever asked them before.