Everyday Sexism


Laura Bates - 2014
    Astounded by the response she received and the wide range of stories that came pouring in from all over the world, she quickly realised that the situation was far worse than she'd initially thought. Enough was enough. From being leered at and wolf-whistled on the street, to aggravation in the work place and serious sexual assault, it was clear that sexism had been normalised. Bates decided it was time for change. This bold, jaunty and ultimately intelligent book is the first to give a collective online voice to the protest against sexism. This game changing book is a juggernaut of stories, often shocking, sometimes amusing and always poignant - it is a must read for every inquisitive, no-nonsense modern woman.

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century


Grace Lee Boggs - 2011
    In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times. From her home in Detroit, she reveals how hope and creativity are overcoming despair and decay within the most devastated urban communities. Her book is a manifesto for creating alternative modes of work, politics, and human interaction that will collectively constitute the next American Revolution.

The Way We Never Were: American Families & the Nostalgia Trap


Stephanie Coontz - 1992
    Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, Coontz sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory


Toril Moi - 1985
    In the years since publication this book has rightly attained the status of a classic. Written for readers with little knowledge of the subject, Sexual/Textual Politics nevertheless makes its own intervention into key debates, arguing provocatively for a commitedly political and theoretical criticism as against merely textual or apolitical approaches.With a new afterword in this edition, Sexual/Textual Politics is a must-read for all those interested in feminist literary theory.

Gender and the Politics of History


Joan Wallach Scott - 1988
    Exploring topics ranging from language and gender to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a crucial interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis.The revised edition--in addition to providing a new generation of readers with access to a classic text in feminist theory and history--reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In provocatively arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book.

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.

On Intersectionality: The Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 2019
    Crenshaw explores how a holistic analysis of discrimination gives rise to a more nuanced understanding of salient social forces. This long-awaited volume examines the Central Park jogger case, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, LGBT activism, Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, and other significant matters of public interest. In each case, her analysis challenges and exposes the intricate social dynamics among individuals and groups whose identities are increasingly layered.This new account covers the evolution of the meaning of intersectionality over the course of two decades and how this concept has radically changed the face of social justice activism. On Intersectionality is compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant critical race theorists of our time.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film


Carol J. Clover - 1992
    Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero - the figure, often a female, who suffers pain and fright but eventually rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

Feminist Theory: A Reader


Wendy Kolmar - 1998
    Selections are organized into five historical periods from the 18th century to the mid-1990s. The book includes key feminist manifestoes to help students see the link between feminist theory and application, as well as clear, concise explanations of 12 key concepts that characterize the development of feminist thought since its inception.

Virgin: The Untouched History


Hanne Blank - 2007
    She tackles the reality of what we do and don't know about virginity and provides a sweeping tour of virgins in history--from virgin martyrs to Queen Elizabeth to billboards in downtown Baltimore telling young women it's not a "dirty word." Virgin proves, as well, how utterly contemporary the topic is--the butt of innumerable jokes, center of spiritual mysteries, locus of teenage angst, popular genre for pornography and nucleus around which the world's most powerful government has created an unprecedented abstinence policy. In this fascinating work, Hanne Blank shows for the first time why this is, and why everything we think we know about virginity is wrong.

Masculine Domination


Pierre Bourdieu - 1998
    Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Kabyle society provides instruments to help us understand the most concealed aspects of the relations between the sexes in our own societies, and to break the bonds of deceptive familiarity that tie us to our own tradition.Bourdieu analyzes masculine domination as a prime example of symbolic violence—the kind of gentle, invisible, pervasive violence exercised through the everyday practices of social life. To understand this form of domination we must also analyze the social mechanisms and institutions—family, school, church, and state—that transform history into nature and eternalize the arbitrary. Only in this way can we open up the possibilities for a kind of political action that can put history in motion again by neutralizing the mechanisms that have naturalized and dehistoricized the relations between the sexes.This new book by Pierre Bourdieu—which has been a bestseller in France—will be essential reading for anyone concerned with questions of gender and sexuality and with the structures that shape our social, political, and personal lives.

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour


Maria Mies - 1986
    It gives a history of the related processes of colonization and "housewifization" and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labor and the role that women have to play as the cheapest producers and consumers. First published in 1986, it was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory. Eleven years on, Maria Mies' theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant; this new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing


Elaine Showalter - 1976
    Showalter is one of the few scholars who can make her readers rush to their bookshelves to refute her point, or simply to experience again Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, or the bitterly illuminating stories of Katherine Mansfield. Her chief innovation is to place the works of famous women writers beside those of the minor or forgotten, building a continuity of influence and inspiration as well as a more complete picture of the social conditions in which women's books have been produced. She has added a new introduction recounting, with justifiable pleasure, how daring and controversial her study seemed when it first appeared in 1977 (and how many enemies it made her). In an afterword, she touches on more recent developments in the women's novel in Britain, including the influence of the dazzling Angela Carter. --Regina Marler

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination


Jessica Benjamin - 1988
    She reveals that domination is a complex psychological process which ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, and shows how it underlies our family life, our social institutions, and especially our sexual relations, in spite of our conscious commitment to equality and freedom.

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 2002
    In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.