The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys


David Benatar - 2012
    Challenging conventional ways of thinking, it examines controversial issues such as sex-based affirmative action, gender roles, and charges of anti-feminism. The book offers an academically rigorous argument in an accessible style, including the careful use of empirical data, and includes examples and engages in a discussion of how sex discrimination against men and boys also undermines the cause for female equality.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity


José Esteban Muñoz - 2009
    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story


Angela Saini - 2017
    But this is not the whole story.Shedding light on controversial research and investigating the ferocious gender wars in biology, psychology and anthropology, Angela Saini takes readers on an eye-opening journey to uncover how women are being rediscovered. She explores what these revelations mean for us as individuals and as a society, revealing an alternative view of science in which women are included, rather than excluded.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions


Jason Hickel - 2017
    In The Divide, Jason Hickel brilliantly lays it out, layer upon layer, until you are left reeling with the outrage of it all.’ - Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut EconomicsFor decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.

The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society


Debra Soh - 2020
    Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today’s society. Both scientific and objective, and drawing on original research and carefully conducted interviews, Soh tackles a wide range of issues, such as gender-neutral parenting, gender dysphoric children, and the neuroscience of being transgender. She debates today’s accepted notion that gender is a social construct and a spectrum, and challenges the idea that there is no difference between how male and female brains operate. The End of Gender is a conversation-starting work that will challenge what you thought you knew about gender, identity, and everything in between. Timely, informative, and provocative, it will arm you with the facts you need to come to your own conclusions about gender identity and its place in the world today.

The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory


Carol J. Adams - 1990
    In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. Praise for The Sexual Politics of Meat: CAROL J. ADAMS i s the author of The Pornography of Meat (Continuum, 2004), and co-author of Beyond Animal Rights (Continuum, 2000), and The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Jane Austen (Continuum, 2008). She has toured as a speaker throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. More information can be found at her website: http://www.triroc.com/caroladams

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today


Rachel Vorona Cote - 2020
    So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

This Sex Which is Not One


Luce Irigaray - 1977
    In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice. Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of language and thought through a challenging writing practice that takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism. Makin more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of the Other Woman, this volume--skillfully translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke--will be essential reading for anyone seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues.

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction


Rosemarie Tong - 1988
    Besides providing up-to-date coverage of liberal, radical (libertarian and cultural), and Marxist-socialist schools of feminism, she covers psychoanalytic, existentialist, and postmodern feminism. All the chapters have been rethought and new chapters on ecofeminism and multicultural and global feminism have been added.In the clear-sighted and accessible style for which has become known, Tong guides the reader through the complexities of even the most notoriously difficult thinkers. Students will become familiar with many of the essential figures in the feminist tradition as well as some of the issues that have been of special concern to women (e.g., pornography, reproductive technology, housework, the environment, and militarism). Moreover, students are repeatedly urged to consider the many differences that separate women (class, race, ethnicity, age, nationality, religion) as well as the sameness that continue to unite women.Tong treats all views with respect and encourages the reader to think both sympathetically and critically about what feminism is and what relevance it has to their own lives. As valuable as the first edition of Feminist Thought, this second edition surpasses its predecessor in depth and breadth. Clearly, Tong believes that feminist thought is still developing even as it approaches the millennium.

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy


Barbara Ehrenreich - 2003
    But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women's traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny — or cleaning woman, nursing-care attendant, maid — eases a "care deficit" in rich countries, while her absence creates one back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels, a diverse and distinguised group of writers offer an unprecedented look at a world shaped by mass migration and economic exchange. Collected and introduced by bestselling authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, these fifteen essays — of which only four have been previously published — reveal a new era in which the main resource extracted from the third world is no longer gold or silver, but love. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and The Worst Years of Our Lives, as well as Blood Rites. She lives near Key West, Florida. Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of national bestsellers The Time Bind and The Second Shift. She live in San Francisco, California.

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls


Mona Eltahawy - 2019
    All the necessary "sins" that women and girls require to erupt.Eltahawy knows that the patriarchy is alive and well, and she is fed up: Sexually assaulted during hajj at the age of fifteen. Groped on the dance floor of a night club in Montreal at fifty. Countless other injustices in the years between. Illuminating her call to action are stories of activists and ordinary women around the world—from South Africa to China, Nigeria to India, Bosnia to Egypt—who are tapping into their inner fury and crossing the lines of race, class, faith, and gender that make it so hard for marginalized women to be heard. Rather than teaching women and girls to survive the poisonous system they have found themselves in, Eltahawy arms them to dismantle it.Brilliant, bold, and energetic, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is a manifesto for all feminists in the fight against patriarchy.

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free


Linda Kay Klein - 2018
    Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question the purity-based sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Sexual shame is by no means confined to evangelical culture; Pure is a powerful wake-up call about our society’s subjugation of women.

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism


Mary Daly - 1978
    '75; Beyond God the Father, '73) has written "an extremist book...on the edge of a culture that is killing itself." Conceived as a radical feminist "Voyage" of woman becoming herself, it's made up of three "Passages." The 1st denounces the reversals & deceptions ("mind pollution") of patriarchal disciplines (including "Godfather" theology) & exuberantly sets out to "discover" the true "Croneology" behind that male mystification. The 2nd, "the most somber part of the Journey," analyzes Goddess-murder (and the murder of the Goddess in every woman) thru the "Sado-Rituals" of five specific historic atrocities: Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, European witchburning, & American gynecology & psychotherapy (gynecology of the mind practiced by the-rapists). Following this "exorcism," the Voyager moves in the 3rd Passage to the Otherworld of lesbian-feminist Spinsters who successfully scorn patriarchal intimidation ("Spooking"), stir "the fire of female friendship" ("Sparking"), &--after a rip-roaring "Unraveling" gotterdammerung--joyously spin on as Revolting Hags. En route Daly purposefully busts out of some traditional (male) forms & language. Altho the word-work of the "living/verbing writer" sometimes gets in the way/weigh of flashing in-sights, a painstaking indictment of scholarly "erasure" of historic events & some bone-chilling facts of women's story, Daly's excursion is bound to inspire Spinsters/Spider Women everywhere & to leave just about everyone else haggard & in-fury-ated.--Kirkus (edited)

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape


Susan Brownmiller - 1975
    In lucid, persuasive prose, Brownmiller has created a definitive, devastating work of lasting social importance.Chosen by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as One of the Outstanding Books of the Year

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State


Catharine A. MacKinnon - 1989
    Using the debate over Marxism and feminism as a point of departure, MacKinnon develops a theory of gender centered on sexual subordination and applies it to the state. The result is an informed and compelling critique of inequality and a transformative vision of a direction for social change.