The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure


Tristan Taormino - 2012
    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women


Marcia AldrichBich Minh Nguyen - 2016
    Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre s boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.Waveform champions the diversity of women s approaches to the structure ofthe essay today a site of invention and innovation, with experiments in collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs, and diptychs. Focused on these explorations of form, Waveform is not wed to a fixed theme or even to women s experiences per se. It is not driven by subject matter but highlights the writers interaction with all manner of subject and circumstance through style, voice, tone, and structure.This anthology presents some of the women who are shaping the essay today, mapping an ever-changing landscape. It is designed to place essays recently written by women such as Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Margo Jefferson, Jaquira Diaz, and Eula Biss into the hands of those who have been waiting patiently for something they could equally claim as their own.Contributors: Marcia Aldrich, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Chelsea Biondolillo, Eula Biss, Barrie Jean Borich, Joy Castro, Meghan Daum, Jaquira Diaz, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Patricia Foster, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Margo Jefferson, Sonja Livingston, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Brenda Miller, Michele Morano, Kyoko Mori, Bich Minh Nguyen, Adriana Paramo, Jericho Parms, Torrey Peters, Kristen Radtke, Wendy Rawlings, Cheryl Strayed, Dana Tommasino, Sarah Valentine, Neela Vaswani, Nicole Walker, Amy Wright"

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations


Clay Shirky - 2008
    'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.

Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order


Richard N. Haass - 2013
    This is the provocative, timely, and unexpected message of Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass’s Foreign Policy Begins at Home.A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges. But U.S. national security depends even more on the United States addressing its burgeoning deficit and debt, crumbling infrastructure, second class schools, and outdated immigration system.Foreign Policy Begins at Home describes a twenty-first century in which power is widely diffused. Globalization, revolutionary technologies, and the rise and decline of new and old powers have created a “nonpolar” world of American primacy but not domination. So far, it has been a relatively forgiving world, with no great rival threatening America directly. How long this strategic respite lasts, according to Haass, will depend largely on whether the United States puts its own house in order. Haass argues for a new American foreign policy: Restoration. At home, the new doctrine would have the country concentrate on restoring the economic foundations of American power. Overseas, the U.S. would stop trying to remake the Middle East with military force, instead emphasizing maintaining the balance of power in Asia, promoting economic integration and energy self-sufficiency in North America, and working to promote collective responses to global challenges.Haass rejects both isolationism and the notion of American decline. But he argues the United States is underperforming at home and overreaching abroad. Foreign Policy Begins at Home lays out a compelling vision for restoring America’s power, influence, and ability to lead the world.

Future Shock


Alvin Toffler - 1970
    Examines the effects of rapid industrial and technological changes upon the individual, the family, and society.

Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life


Dave Kindred - 2010
    Morning Miracle definitively answers the question “Do newspapers still matter?” with a resounding yes.What The Kingdom and the Power did for the New York Times, Morning Miracle will do for the Washington Post. A reporter for more than forty years, Dave Kindred takes you inside the heart of the legendary newspaper and offers a unique opportunity to see what it really takes to produce world-class journalism every day. Granted unprecedented access to every nook and cranny of the paper, including candid exchanges with its most celebrated journalists, such as Bob Woodward, Sally Quinn, David Broder, and former executive editor Ben Bradlee (who gave the book its title), Kindred provides a no-holds-barred look at the twenty-first-century newsroom. As it becomes more difficult to maintain journalistic integrity, stay relevant in the age of blogs, and meet Wall Street’s demands for profits, the newspaper—more than any other medium—also shoulders the tremendous responsibility of acting as a watchdog for democracy. Perhaps no one sums up the overwhelming challenges that face the Post and its power to endure better than the author himself: “It is still a miracle that you can put 700 overcaffeinated misfits in a newsroom, on deadline, adrenaline running, secrets to spill, and before midnight a messenger delivers a smoking-hot city edition to Don Graham’s manse in Georgetown.”

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination


Avery F. Gordon - 1996
    ” —George Lipsitz“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles LemertDrawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives


Carolyn Steedman - 1986
    Partly autobiographical, taking a mother and her daughter; two working-class childhoods (Burnley in the 1920s, South London in the 1950s) and trying to find a place for their stories in history and politics, in psychoanalysis and feminism. What happens to cultural criticism when you confront it with working-class women and little girls? What happens when psychoanalysis is asked to look at women who don't possess the wish for a child? And what happens to theories of patriarchy when autobiography deals with a working-class father who isn't important in the world outside the household? This book is about the centrality of some stories and the marginality of others, and about the stories we tell ourselves to explain our lives.

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers


Marina Warner - 1994
    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory


Adrian Praetzellis - 2000
    A large stone Venus. Nothing unusual about it_except that it was found on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Archaeologist Hannah Green and her shovelbum nephew find themselves in a tangled web of competing interests avaricious land owners, hungry media, and a cult of goddess worshippers while investigating one of the finds of the century. In untangling the mystery of the Washington Venus, Hannah and Sean have to confront questions of archaeological evidence, of ethics, of conflicting interpretation of data, and of the very nature of archaeological truths. Helping them are a cadre of disdainful graduate students who propose various theories processualist, marxist, feminist, postmodernist to explain the bizarre events. Teach your students archaeological theory in a fashion they'll enjoy, while they solve the mystery in Adrian Praetzellis's delightful textbook-as-novel.

The Future of Nostalgia


Svetlana Boym - 2001
    She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities--St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague--and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom


Leslie C. Bell - 2013
    Drawing from her years of experience as a researcher and a psychotherapist, Leslie C. Bell takes us directly into the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges. In candid interviews, Bell’s subjects reveal that, despite having more choices than ever, they face great uncertainty about desire, sexuality, and relationships. Ground-breaking and highly readable, Hard to Get offers fascinating insights into the many ways that sex, love, and satisfying relationships prove surprisingly elusive to these young women as they navigate the new emotional landscape of the 21st century.

Female Masculinity


J. Jack Halberstam - 1998
    In Female Masculinity Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. He considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. He also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"---lesbians who pass as men---and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men & A Vindication of the Rights of Woman & An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution


Mary Wollstonecraft - 1993
    It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres. Janet Todd's introduction illuminates the progress of Wollstonecraft's thought, showing that a reading of all three works allows her to emerge as a more substantial political writer than a study of The Rights of Woman alone can reveal.

Belonging: A Culture of Place


bell hooks - 2004
    Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home. hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.