Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    Deeply researched and fully illustrated, this book demystifies an intensely personal—yet universal—facet of humanity. Illustrating a different concept on each spread, queer author and artist Iris Gottlieb touches on history, science, sociology, and her own experience. This book is an essential tool for understanding and contributing to a necessary cultural conversation, bringing clarity and reassurance to the sometimes confusing process of navigating ones' identity. Whether LGBTQ+, cisgender, or nonbinary, Seeing Gender is a must-read for intelligent, curious, want-to-be woke people who care about how we see and talk about gender and sexuality in the 21st century.

    In a world that tells women we're either not enough or too much, it's time we stop directing our anger and insecurities onto ourselves, and start fighting back to re-shape the toxic structures of our patriarchal society.Florence's book will help you to tackle and challenge the limiting narrative you have been bombarded with your whole life, and determine feminism on your own terms. After all, you are the love of your own life.

    Focusing on Huli “passenger women,” (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of “prostitution” and “sex work,” Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated “olsem maket” (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming “wayward.” Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women’s own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.

    But her story has had its obstacles, including being her own parent, living in her car as a teenager, and moving to New York City to pursue her dreams. Through it all, she looked to movies, TV, and music as the family and support systems she never had.From spending the holidays alone to having better “stranger luck” than with those closest to her to feeling like the last hopeless romantic on earth, Lane reveals her powerful and entertaining journey in all its candor, anxiety, and ultimate acceptance—with humor always her bolstering force and greatest gift.How to Be Alone is a must-read for anyone whose childhood still feels unresolved, who spends more time pretending to have friends online than feeling close to anyone in real life, who tries to have genuine, deep conversations in a roomful of people who would rather you not. Above all, it’s a book for anyone who desperately wants to feel less alone and a little more connected through reading her words.

    So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm. Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.And Emily Nagoski can prove it.

    Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

    There was immediate uproar. The incident was, in many ways, the culmination of a life of youthful rebellion and brash sexuality that Protima, the scandalous model and wife of the rising star of Bollywood, Kabir Bedi, had lived ever since she ran away from home to live ‘in sin’. Barely four years later, the glamorous flower child had reinvented herself as an accomplished classical dancer, a devotee of Goddess Kali, and chosen the sari over slit skirts and halter-necks Shortly before her death, she had shaved her head and decided on a monk’s life. She died in August 1998, in a landslide in the Himalayas while on a pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar, leaving behind her most lasting achievement—a flourishing dance village, Nrityagram, where students continue to learn the classical dance styles of India Few lives have been more eventful and controversial than Protima Bedi’s, and Timepass, derived from her unfinished autobiography, journals and her letters to family, friends and lovers, is a startlingly frank and passionate memoir. Protima recounts with unflinching honesty the events that shaped her life: her humiliation as a child at being branded the ugly duckling, repeated rape by a cousin when she was barely ten, the failure of her ‘open’ marriage with Kabir Bedi, her many sexual encounters, and the romantic relationships she had with prominent politicians and artistes. She writes, too, of her involvement with dance, her relationship with her guru and fellow dancers, the difficult mission of establishing Nrityagram, and the suicide of her son—a tragedy from which she never fully recovered. In a moving afterword to the book, her daughter, Pooja Bedi, describes her last days and the circumstances of her death. Illustrated with over fifty photographs, Timepass is the story of a remarkable woman who had the spirit, the courage and the intelligence to live life entirely on her own terms.

    Tens of thousands learned the emotional and ethical skills of BDSM topping from the first `Topping Book.` Now, in addition to the sage advice and good humor that made the first edition a classic, the authors tackle some of the issues that have come up for tops in the last six years: on-line domination, the challenges and rewards of `lifestyle` relationships, ensuring our own and our partners` safety, and more.

     For as far back as humanity goes, women have struggled to understand why men behave the way they do. Does he like me? Why won’t he commit? Why doesn’t he text back? Does he mean what he says? Why is he withdrawing? How does he really feel? These are just a few examples of questions that women all over the world are desperate to know the answers to… and now they can, once and for all. This book takes a look at the most common relationship scenarios—the ones that cause the most confusion—and explains everything. It provides a breakdown of the male psyche, as well as honest confessions from the authors and men who were brave enough to share their stories. 10 Things Every Woman Needs to Know About Men will free you from all your doubts and confusion and give you the gift of clarity. You will never again feel the need to try to figure him out… instead you can bask in the joy of just understanding exactly why he does what he does.

     Well, look no further. This book contains the affirmations necessary to retrain your mind and redirect your energy in the direction of your destiny. Read to understand and meditate on these passages regularly, and watch everything about your life improve starting with your perspective.

    It causes me to feel envy, despair, pride and superiority. It cuts away at my relationship with God, with my loved ones, and with myself. It has promised me contentment, and yet robbed me of it.And although I don't know you at all, I'm fairly sure you have CCS, too. That's not meant to sound rude. It's just that I've rarely met a woman who doesn't struggle with it."This book is about how to spot this syndrome and its effects in your life; the view of life that causes it; how the gospel treats it; and how you can move beyond it to live a life of true, lasting contentment.

    Maybe she tried to speak up in a meeting, only to be talked over by male colleagues. Or a client addressed her male subordinate instead of her. These stories remain true even for women at the top of their fields; in the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, female justices are interrupted four times more often than their male colleagues—and 96 percent of the time by men. Despite the progress we’ve made toward equality, we still fail, more often than we might realize, to take women as seriously as men.In The Authority Gap, journalist Mary Ann Sieghart provides a startling perspective on the gender bias at work in our everyday lives and reflected in the world around us, whether in pop culture, media, school classrooms, or politics. With precision and insight, Sieghart marshals a wealth of data from a variety of disciplines—including psychology, sociology, political science, and business—and talks to pioneering women like Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, renowned classicist Mary Beard, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, and Hillary Clinton. She speaks with women from a range of backgrounds to explore how gender bias intersects with race and class biases.Eye-opening and galvanizing, The Authority Gap teaches us how we as individuals, partners, parents, and coworkers can together work to narrow the gap. Sieghart exposes unconscious bias in this fresh feminist take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all: men as well as women.

    It took her more than a decade to realize what she was actually trying to write: how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. The outpouring of responses gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. While some of the writers in this book are estranged from their mothers, others are extremely close. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in breaking the silence. Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributors include Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.

    An essential handbook on a favorite topic—love—it will help women understand the wider meaning of love as a tool, a resource, and a force. It encourages girls to love themselves first and then reflect on the significance of love outside the common perceptions of romantic love and its role in their friendships and the world at large. It is a road map for every woman to navigate long-distance relationships, determine the real Prince Charmings, overcome icon infatuations, rediscover childhood dreams, and rule in all affairs of the heart.