Comprising a range of voices from both within and outside the academy, this collection draws from traditional feminisms, postmodern feminism, queer theory, and sex radicalism. It stretches the boundaries of contemporary feminism, holding accountable both traditional feminism for stigmatizing sex workers, and also the sex industry for its sexist practices.

    Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.

    The intellectual and spiritual worlds of women are also explored.Based on an abundance of research from the last twenty-five years, Medieval Women describes the diversity and vitality of English women's lives in the Middle Ages.

    On this six-part live performance series, bestselling author and beloved cantadora (keeper of the old stories) Clarissa Pinkola Estés shares the work of her lifetime: myths, tales, and poetry with the power to nourish and heal. Contained within Theatre of the Imagination are the great universal themes—tales of loss and resurrection; of love and sacrifice; of the courage to survive—yet it is as if Dr. Estés is speaking only to you. With words that weave in and out of the interior and exterior worlds, she creates an amazing fabric of the purest wisdom—fought for, won, and preserved to teach all generations—that which is most worth knowing. You will hear more than 40 original poems, archetypal insights, and dozens of strengthening stories from Dr. Estés' own family's oral traditions. Dr. Estés teaches that each story holds a key to a deeper self-knowing: "Stories cut fine wide doors in previous blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning that lead us back to our own real lives."Presented in her one-of-a-kind lyrical style, Theatre of the Imagination seats you in the front row at these performances of a lifetime. More than five hours of signature stories, plus earthy and wise advice, archetypal insights, poetry, and much more. Six Healing Stories Include: Las Tres Osas Viejas (The Three Old Ones)• The Fisherman's Wife• Skeleton Woman• The Crescent Moon Bear• Sealskin/Soulskin• Wolfen Learn More About:The cycles of life and death• How the language of symbols translates into everyday life• Community and healing the homesickness within the soul• How to stop your destructive inner critic• Reclaiming the bodies we were born with• Facing the cycles of change in a relationship• Agelessness and the aerial view of the elder• How to awaken the 1,000 eyes of your intuition• Transformation through the four vital steps to forgiveness• The power of the Divine Child• Finding courage and the sacred center of the psyche• When others try to silence you: how to claim your strength

    In addition, decades of negative campaigns, excessively "messaged" issues, and hanging chads have all combined to make political apathy appear not only smart, but sexy. The result is that while they still bemoan the state of gender politics, gender equity, and the agendas of their local, state, and national politicians, nearly 19 million young women chose not to vote in the last presidential election.Yes, the face of feminism is changing, but to what end? Is a new generation taking for granted the rights hard-won only a generation before? And by focusing on culturalnot electoralpolitics, are young women giving their power away? In this pivotal book, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, political and environmental consultant (and wife of Washington State s Republican senate majority leader), asks these critical questions, tracing feminism s distinguished past and asking what can be done to protect and further women s rights and freedoms."

    Katie’s sexual odyssey began before she was even sixteen. She started out stripping on webcam for an audience of strangers and soon she was meeting and having increasingly adventurous sex with numerous men each week, determined to expand her sexual horizons and explore her submissive nature. When Katie discovered the secretive swingers’ scene, her behaviour escalated as she found the perfect outlet for her voracious sexual appetite. After her first nervous encounters with experienced swingers, she threw herself into the anything-goes lifestyle and became the most popular girl on the scene, proudly taking centre stage at fifty-strong sex parties. Katie’s uncontrollable sexual urge eventually led her to experiment with women, explore S&M fetishes and have sex with up to ten men in one night. Katie sought out ever more extreme sexual experiences and she eventually began to wonder if her behaviour was really an expression of her sexual freedom, or if it had grown out of something darker.Can You Keep a Secret? is the brutally honest and sometimes unsettling account of a young girl’s journey into the sexual underworld.Available via Amazon.com and iBooks.

    It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds.The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure.Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.

    When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture , author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond. With a comprehensive overview of the intertwining relationship between women and pop culture, this book is an ideal introduction to discussing feminism and daily life.

    Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women.The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing.While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.

    A personal story of Kate Millett's struggle to regain control of her life after falling under an ascription of manic depression.

    She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society, a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision.

    Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

    " --Elizabeth Fernea, The University of Texas at Austin"If a reader were to select only one book in order to gain insight into women's status and prospects in Islamic society, this study should be the one chosen for its clarity, honesty, depth of knowledge and thought-provoking qualities." --Arab Book WorldIn this expanded and updated edition, with a new introduction on Muslim women and fundamentalism, Mernissi argues that Islamic fundamentalism is in part a defense against recent changes in sex roles and perceptions of sexual identity. Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) was a leading advocate for women’s rights in the Muslim world. In 2003, she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature along with Susan Sontag. Mernissi’s works have been translated into thirty languages.

    The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

    But while the famous question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if more discreetly: "Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?"Historian David K. Johnson here relates the frightening, untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a "Lavender Scare" more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy's Red Scare. Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also shows, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle.The Lavender Scare shatters the myth that homosexuality has only recently become a national political issue, changing the way we think about both the McCarthy era and the origins of the gay rights movement. And perhaps just as importantly, this book is a cautionary tale, reminding us of how acts taken by the government in the name of "national security" during the Cold War resulted in the infringement of the civil liberties of thousands of Americans.