Book picks similar to
Feminism, Breasts And Breast Feeding by Pam Carter
theory
women-authors
feminism-misc
history-pol-women
Everybody: A Book about Freedom
Olivia Laing - 2021
In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of Joseph McCarthy’s America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement
Robin MorganMary Daly - 1970
This anthology captures the range of problems being considered by the new feminists, and the variety of approaches to analysis and action. Over fifty contributors, all women, write about how the "51% minority group" is used and abused by the major institutions of our society--marriage, the family, church, courts, the media, welfare, the schools, the professions, business, and industry. A section on the psychological and sexual repression of women attacks the freudian view of the female, and discusses the problems of the aging woman, abortion and birth control, prostitution, the persecution of lesbians. Black women, a Mexican woman, high school women, ex-New Leftists, housewives, and seasoned feminists speak from their experience in tones that range from detachment to outrage. ARE MEN REALLY THE ENEMY?A Questionnaire by Jayne West, from No More Fun and Games True or False __ Woman's work is never done. __ You can't tell a book by its cover. __ Housework can be fun. __ A female dog is referred to as a bitch. __ One of the more degrading terms that can be applied to a man is "son of a bitch." Multiple Choice 1. Most rapes are committed by: (a) women; (b) children; (c) men (perverts); (d) I am unable to distinguish rape from ordinary sexual relations. 2. Which do you prefer being called: (a) lady; (b) woman; (c) female; (d) girl; (e) none of the above. 3. If I could do away with anything I wanted, the first thing I would do away with is: (a) the family; (b) the state; (c) private property; (d) menstrual periods; (e) all of the above. Essay Discuss the variations in tone possible when asking a male druggist: "Have you Tampax Super?"
A Theory of Adaptation
Linda Hutcheon - 2006
Adaptation, Hutcheon argues, has always been a central mode of the story-telling imagination and deserves to be studied in all its breadth and range as both a process (of creation and reception) and a product unto its own.Persuasive and illuminating, A Theory of Adaptation is a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres that may put an end to the age-old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park.
Feminist Film Theory: A Reader
Sue Thornham - 1999
This anthology charts the history of those debates, bringing together the key, classic essays in feminist film theory. Feminist Film Theory maps the impact of major theoretical developments on this growing field-from structuralism and psychoanalysis in the 1970s, to post-colonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism in the 1990s.Covering a wide range of topics, including oppressive images, woman as fetishized object of desire, female spectatorship, and the cinematic pleasures of black women and lesbian women, Feminist Film Theory is an indispensable reference for scholars and students in the field.Contributors include Judith Butler, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Michelle Citron, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa De Lauretis, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Molly Haskell, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Smith, Jackie Stacey, Janet Staiger, Anna Marie Taylor, Valerie Walkerdine, and Linda Williams.
Feminist City: A Field Guide
Leslie Kern - 2019
Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Lawrence Lessig - 2004
Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.
The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction
Rachel P. Maines - 1998
Doctors loathed this time-consuming procedure and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the efficiency of mechanical devices, including the electric vibrator, invented in the 1880s. In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines offers readers a stimulating, surprising, and often humorous account of hysteria and its treatment throughout the ages, focusing on the development, use, and fall into disrepute of the vibrator as a legitimate medical device.
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality
Hanne Blank - 2012
The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that turns out to be anything but straight or narrow.
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Barbara Ehrenreich - 2006
Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, "Dancing in the Streets" concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.
Complexity: A Guided Tour
Melanie Mitchell - 2009
Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. Richly illustrated, Complexity: A Guided Tour--winner of the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science--offers a wide-ranging overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for its contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.
Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
Jaclyn Friedman - 2008
Feminist, political, and activist writers alike will present their ideas for a paradigm shift from the “No Means No” model—an approach that while necessary for where we were in 1974, needs an overhaul today.Yes Means Yes will bring to the table a dazzling variety of perspectives and experiences focused on the theory that educating all people to value female sexuality and pleasure leads to viewing women differently, and ending rape. Yes Means Yes aims to have radical and far-reaching effects: from teaching men to treat women as collaborators and not conquests, encouraging men and women that women can enjoy sex instead of being shamed for it, and ultimately, that our children can inherit a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished. With commentary on public sex education, pornography, mass media, Yes Means Yes is a powerful and revolutionary anthology.
Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Carla Shalaby - 2017
Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children—Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.From Zora’s proud individuality to Marcus’s open willfulness, from Sean’s struggle with authority to Lucas’s tenacious imagination, comes profound insight—for educators and parents alike—into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child’s path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.Shalaby’s empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands—despite good intentions—work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Shulamith Firestone - 1970
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.
Nobody's Child
Kanchana Banerjee - 2019
I won the Indian Koel 3 years ago.’A young woman, dazed, covered in wounds, mind addled by drugs tells a TV journalist on the streets of Mumbai. Soon she breaks into a song, leaving everyone mesmerized by her melodious voice.How can she be Asavri? Asavri died in a car accident 3 years ago, soon after her win. Her body was cremated; her death mourned by the whole nation. Is the woman an imposter or is she telling the truth?News spreads like wildfire, the press and public begin clamouring for answers. If this is indeed the real Asavri, then who was cremated three years ago? And who is responsible for these macabre circumstances? Is it Tanya, the first runner-up who wore the victor’s crown after Asavri was declared dead, or Rudra – Asavri’s ex-husband? Or is it Kamini Devi – the glamorous MP with a sinister plan? Or Avniel – the film journalist – who shot to fame by writing Asavri’s biography soon after her death?And why does Asavri keep muttering the name Monty. Who is he? Her tormentor or saviour.An exhilarating & chilling story about the dark side of fame.
The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life
Michael Blastland - 2008
Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less,, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers. The radical premise of The Numbers Game is to show how much we already know, and give practical ways to use our knowledge to become cannier consumers of the media. In each concise chapter, the authors take on a different theme—such as size, chance, averages, targets, risk, measurement, and data—and present it as a memorable and entertaining story. If you’ve ever wondered what “average” really means, whether the scare stories about cancer risk should convince you to change your behavior, or whether a story you read in the paper is biased (and how), you need this book. Blastland and Dilnot show how to survive and thrive on the torrent of numbers that pours through everyday life. It’s the essential guide to every cause you love or hate, and every issue you follow, in the language everyone uses.