top of page

Kitablar

In Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?

When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic.

Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.

Leila Ahmad

A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America

Does gay marriage support the right-wing goal of linking access to basic human rights like health care and economic security to an inherently conservative tradition?
    Will the ability of queers to fight in wars of imperialism help liberate and empower LGBT people around the world?
    Does hate-crime legislation affirm and strengthen historically anti-queer institutions like the police and prisons rather than dismantling them?

 The Against Equality collective asks some hard questions. These queer thinkers, writers, and artists are committed to undermining a stunted conception of “equality.” In this powerful book, they challenge mainstream gay and lesbian struggles for inclusion in elitist and inhumane institutions. More than a critique, Against Equality seeks to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility!

Ryan Conrad (Editor); Against Equality (Editor)

Against Equality Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion

For Emma Goldman, the “High Priestess of Anarchy,” anarchism was “a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions,” but “the most elemental force in human life” was something still more basic and vital: sex.

“The Sex Question” emerged for Goldman in multiple contexts, and we find her addressing it in writing on subjects as varied as women’s suffrage, “free love,” birth control, the “New Woman,” homosexuality, marriage, love, and literature. It was at once a political question, an economic question, a question of morality, and a question of social relations.

But her analysis of that most elemental force remained fragmentary, scattered across numerous published (and unpublished) works and conditioned by numerous contexts. Anarchy and the Sex Question draws together the most important of those scattered sources, uniting both familiar essays and archival material, in an attempt to recreate the great work on sex that Emma Goldman might have given us. In the process, it sheds light on Goldman’s place in the history of feminism.

Emma Goldman

Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1917

Attitudes toward homosexuality in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world are commonly depicted as schizophrenic—visible and tolerated on one hand, prohibited by Islam on the other. Khaled El-Rouayheb argues that this apparent paradox is based on the anachronistic assumption that homosexuality is a timeless, self-evident fact to which a particular culture reacts with some degree of tolerance or intolerance. Drawing on poetry, biographical literature, medicine, dream interpretation, and Islamic texts, he shows that the culture of the period lacked the concept of homosexuality.

Khaled El-Rouayheb

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British campaign against lynching in the United States. Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.

Vron Ware

Beyond the Pale White Women, Racism, and History

Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what has—and, crucially, has not—changed over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.

Michele Wallace

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

"This collection of works is ambitious, well documented, thoroughly—though not turgidly—referenced, and comprehensively indexed. It is deeply disturbing and deeply engaging... " —Australian Feminist Studies

Contributors discuss the subtle and complex relationships between various notions of "feminism" and "peace." Feminist peace issues are explored along a wide spectrum of personal and political issues—from the personal violations of rape, incest, and domestic abuse, to the violence of racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, and genocide.

KAREN J. WARREN

Bringing Peace Home: Feminism, Violence, and Nature

The most comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos, chronicling our rage and dreams from the nineteenth century to today

Editors’ Choice from The New York Times Book Review

In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto—raging and wanting, quarreling and provoking—has always played a central role in feminism, and it’s the angry, brash feminism we need now.

Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this confrontational sisterhood, you’ll find:

  • “Dyke Manifesto” by the Lesbian Avengers
  • “The Ax Tampax Poem Feministo” by the Bloodsisters Project
  • “The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft” by Peter Grey
  • “Simone de Beauvoir’s pro-abortion Manifesto of the 343
  • “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” by Frances M. Beal
  • “The Futurist Manifesto of Lust” by Valentine de Saint-Point
  • “Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Laws”
  • “Riot Grrrl Manifesto” by Bikini Kill
  • “Anarchy and the Sex Question” by Emma Goldman

Breanne Fahs argues that we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness—their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance ignites new and revolutionary possibilities is where new ideas are born.

Edited by Breanne Fahs

Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution

Written by leading scholars in the field, "Causes of War" provides the first comprehensive analysis of the leading theories relating to the origins of both interstate and civil wars.Utilizes historical examples to illustrate individual theories throughoutIncludes an analysis of theories of civil wars as well as interstate wars -- one of the only texts to do bothWritten by two former International Studies Association Presidents

Jack S. Levy, William R. Thompson

Causes of War

In recent years a remarkable range of new work has been produced dealing with class inequalities, the division of labor, and the state. In these writings scholars previously working in isolation from one another in sociology, economics, political science, and history have found common ground. Much of this work has been influenced by Marxist theory, but at the same time it has involved critiques of established Marxist views, and incorporated ideas drawn from other sources. These developments have until now not been reflected in existing course texts which are often diffusely concerned with “social stratification” and lack reference to contemporary theory.

Classes, Power, and Conflict breaks new ground in providing a comprehensive introduction to current debates and contemporary research. In also connects these to the classical sources, concentrating particularly on Marx, Lenin and Weber. The book therefore offers a comprehensive coverage of materials for students who have little or no prior acquaintance with the field. Each section of the book contains a substantial introduction, explaining and expanding on the themes of the selections contained within that section. Classes, Power, and Conflict can be expected to become the standard text for courses in sociology and political science.

Anthony Giddens

Classes, Power and Conflict: Classical and Contemporary Debates

Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women’s liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether “bourgeois” and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women’s movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.

Rachel Hills’s foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy’s analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women’s labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.

Christine Delphy

Close to Home A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression

Come Together tells the incredible story of the emerging radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front, providing a vivid history of the movement, as well as the new ideas and practices it gave rise to across the United Kingdom. Before marriage equality or military service, Come Together reminds us of paths forged but not taken by queer politics in its earliest stages.

Aubrey Walter

Come Together The Years of Gay Liberation 1970-73

Compañeras is the untold story of women’s involvement in the Zapatista movement, the indigenous rebellion that has inspired grassroots activists around the world for over two decades. Gathered here are the stories of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who became guerrilla insurgents and political leaders, educators and healers—who worked collectively to construct a new society of dignity and justice.

Compañeras shows us how, after centuries of oppression, a few voices of dissent became a force of thousands, how a woman once confined to her kitchen rose to conduct peace negotiations with the Mexican government, and how hundreds of women overcame engrained hardships to strengthen their communities from within.

Hilary Klein

Compañeras Zapatista Women's Stories

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Forward-thinking pedagogues as well as peace researchers have, in recent decades, cast a critical eye over teaching content and methodology with the aim of promulgating notions of peace and sustainability in education. This volume gives voice to the reflections of educational theorists and practitioners who have taken on the task of articulating a ‘curriculum of difference’ that gives positive voice to these key concepts in the pedagogical arena. Here, contributors from around the world engage with paradigm-shifting discourses that reexamine questions of ontology and human subjectivity―discourses that advocate interdisciplinarity as well as the reformulation of epistemological boundaries. Deconstructing the origins and limits of human knowledge and learning, the book affords educators the opportunity to identify and express common elements of the subjects taught and studied in educational institutions, elements that facilitate students’ apprehension of peace and sustainability.

With penetrating analysis of contemporary issues in the field, this volume introduces a range of fresh theoretical approaches that extend the boundaries of peace education, which is broadly defined as promoting the responsible, equitable and sustainable co-existence of differing human communities. In doing so, the chapters show how we can improve our lives as well as our chances of survival as a species by acknowledging the importance of shared human aspirations that cut across borders, of genuinely listening to alternative voices and opinions, of challenging the ubiquitous, socially constructed historical narratives that define human relations only in terms of power. Charged with vitality and originality, this new publication is a critical examination of issues central to the development and utility of global education.

P.P.Trifonas

Critical Peace Education: Difficult Dialogues

War was pervasive in the 20th century, and the 21st century seems to hold little promise of improvement. War is still one of the world's most destructive forces, which on a daily basis touches the lives of millions of people. To increase the understanding of the pervasiveness and destructiveness of the institution of war, all possible frameworks of knowledge must be mobilized. Cultural War Studies has an important role to play in adding to this knowledge, by putting the critical vocabulary of Cultural Studies to good use in analyzing the constructions that push us towards a glorified killing of fellow human beings and then try to make us forget the intensity and durability of the trauma. The first part of this book focuses on the diversity of the media that generate meanings and definitions of past and contemporary wars. These chapters are not restricted to the more traditional analyses of media content, but utilize these media products to reflect on contemporary cultural condition(s) in the USA and Europe. The second part of the book moves (at least partially) away from media representations and focuses on torture and incarceration. Although in this part, the materiality of war and conflict is very present, these analyses again show the importance of the constructions of enemy identities and of (the acceptability of) violent practices. The third and final part of the book is related to memory and trauma. A series of 20th century conflicts and wars are revisited to demonstrate the cultural durability of war and the interconnection of these wars with present-day discourses and practices through the dialectics of remembering, commemorating and forgetting.

Nico Carpentier

Culture, Trauma, and Conflict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War by Culture, Trauma, and Conflict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War

Over the last ten years, Western governments and mainstream media have utilized concepts of white masculine supremacy and feminine helplessness, juxtaposed with Orientalist images depicting women of color as mysterious, sinister, and dangerous, to support war. Oscillating between Mrs Anthrax, female suicide bomber and tragic, helpless victim, representations of 'brown women' have spawned both rescue narratives and terrorist alerts.
Examining media and pop culture from Sex and the City 2 to Vanity Fair and Time magazine, Robin Riley uses transnational feminist analysis to reveal how this kind of transnational sexism towards Muslim women in general and Afghan and Iraqi women in particular has led to a new form of gender imperialism.

Robin Riley

Depicting the Veil: Transnational Sexism and the War on Terror

Examining the development of ecofeminism from the 1980s antimilitarist movement to an internationalist ecofeminism in the 1990s, Sturgeon explores the ecofeminist notions of gender, race, and nature. She moves from detailed historical investigations of important manifestations of US ecofeminism to a broad analysis of international environmental politics.

Noel Sturgeon

Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action

A founding text of transnational feminism
For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East. In this engaging and well-researched survey, Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.

Journalist and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria’s foreword to this new edition is an impassioned letter in two parts: the first to Western feminists; the second to feminists in the Global South, entreating them to use this “compendium of female courage” as a bridge between women of different nations.

Kumari Jayawardena

Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

This is a manifesto for the 99 percent

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change—these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren’t they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe?

Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist.

Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser

Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto

Recent years have seen massive feminist mobilisations in virtually every continent, overturning social mores and repressive legislation. As women filled the streets of Argentina and Madrid, of Italy and Poland, they’ve transformed the meaning of radical politics and the grammar of various struggles.

In this brilliant and kaleidoscopic look at the emerging feminist international, Verónica Gago uses the women’s strike as both a concept and a collective experience. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto, Feminist International draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class.

Gago’s feminism is a powerful call to abandon the rhetoric of victimisation, and to instead mount a frontal challenge to both neo-liberal rule and the conservative counteroffensive. Feminist International asks what another theory of power might look like, one premised on our desire to change everything.

Verónica Gago

Feminist International How to Change Everything

Two books by Birgit Brock-Utne, Educating for Peace and Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education, convey the picture of their author, an internationally known activist in women's work for peace. Peace is defined not only as absence of violence, but as equality of rights as well. The author provides plenty of facts about the disadvantageous living conditions and position of women, and classifies this information into categories of violence. A feminist perspective on peace education means concentrating on women's possibilities to influence the socialization process of (their) children. The author's personal contribution consists of analysing a wealth of research results from the viewpoint of gender-specific socialization. Starting from the view that boys are educated for war and girls for peace, the author develops a view of socialization that would promote peace. The discussion of socialization concentrates on its influence on personality traits of youngsters, but the growth process itself is not really analysed. Seen from the author's feminist perspective, the formal school system is unfit for peace education, functioning to maintain the existing (male) power structure of society. Conceptual extrapolation from individual traits to the relationships between nations and national states is characteristic of many views presented by the author. In the final pages of the second monograph, the author states that in order to promote peace, changes should be made simultaneously at the micro-, meso- and macrolevels of society. If this is taken seriously, then the role of the formal school system cannot be overlooked.

Birgit Brock-Utne

Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education

This book rethinks security theory from a feminist perspective – uniquely, it engages feminism, security, and strategic studies to provide a distinct feminist approach to security studies.

The volume explicitly works toward an opening up of security studies that would allow for feminist (and other) narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. To make this possible, it presents a feminist reading of security studies that aims to invigorate the debate and radicalize critical security studies. Since feminism is a political project, and security studies are, at their base, about particular visions of the political and their attendant institutions, this is of necessity a political intervention. The book works through and beyond security studies to explore possible spaces where an opening of security, necessary to make way for feminist insights, can take place. While it develops and illustrates a feminist narrative approach to security, it is also intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices.

This book provides develops a comprehensive framework for the emerging field of feminist security studies and will be of great interest to students and scholars of feminist IR, critical security studies, gender studies and IR and security studies in general.

Annick T.R. Wibben

Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach

This chapter introduces readers to feminist theory as a multifaceted and multi-sited project, not a bounded field. Grounded in the political struggles for women’s empowerment that have emerged in all regions of the world and convinced of the arbitrariness of exclusion based on sexual difference, feminist theory has flourished as a mode of critical theory that illuminates the limitations of popular assumptions about sex, race, sexuality, and gender. This introduction identifies three common characteristics of feminist theory projects in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: (1) efforts to denaturalize that which passes for difference, (2) efforts to challenge the aspiration to produce universal and impartial knowledge, and (3) efforts to engage the complexity of power relations through intersectional analysis. It sets the stage for the principal aim of this Handbook: to demonstrate how feminist theory is crucial to grasping the power dynamics operating in contemporary life.

Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth

Feminist Theory: Transforming the Known World

In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty cutting-edge voices, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie, invite us to imagine a truly feminist world. An abortion provider reinvents birth control, Sheila Bapat envisions an economy that values domestic work, a teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music, Katherine Cross rewrites the Constitution, and Maya Dusenbery resets the standard for good sex. Combining essays, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and short stories, The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given—and inspires us to demand a radically better future.

Alexandra Brodsky (Editor); Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (Editor)

Feminist Utopia Project Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future

The emergence and evolution of Egyptian feminism is an integral, but previously untold, part of the history of modern Egypt. Drawing upon a wide range of women's sources--memoirs, letters, essays, journalistic articles, fiction, treatises, and extensive oral histories--Margot Badran shows how Egyptian women assumed agency and in so doing subverted and refigured the conventional patriarchal order. Unsettling a common claim that "feminism is Western" and dismantling the alleged opposition between feminism and Islam, the book demonstrates how the Egyptian feminist movement in the first half of this century both advanced the nationalist cause and worked within the parameters of Islam.

Margot Badran

Feminists, Islam, and Nation

Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis.

Nancy Fraser

Fortunes of Feminism From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis

In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prosecutes its wars. In doing so, she calls for a reconceptualization of the left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of interventionist military action.

Judith Butler

Frames of War When Is Life Grievable?

By investigating public records, journals, and books published between 1895 and 1917, Terence Kissack expands the scope of the history of LGBT politics in the United States. The anarchists Kissack examines—such as Emma Goldman, Benjamin Tucker, and Alexander Berkman—defended the right of individuals to pursue same-sex relations, often challenging the conservative beliefs of their fellow anarchists as well as those outside the movement—police, clergy, and medical authorities—who condemned LGBT people.

In his book, Kissack examines the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the life and work of Walt Whitman, periodicals including Tucker's Liberty and Leonard Abbott's The Free Comrade, and the frank treatment of homosexual relations in Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. By defending the right to enter into same-sex partnerships free from social and governmental restraints, the anarchists posed a challenge to society still not met today.

Terence Kissack is a former Executive Director of San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, and he currently serves on the board. His writings have appeared in Radical History Review and Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Terrence Kissack

Free Comrades Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States

Cowards don’t make history; and the women of Mujeres Libres (Free Women) were no cowards. Courageous enough to create revolutionary change in their daily lives, Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women into an organized network to strive for community, education, and equality for women -during the Spanish Revolution. Martha Ackelsberg writes a comprehensive study of Mujeres Libres, intertwining interviews with the women themselves and analysis connecting them with modern feminist movements.

Martha Ackelsberg is a professor of government and a member of the Women’s Studies Program Committee at Smith College, where she teaches courses in political theory, urban politics, political activism and feminist theory. She has contributed to a variety of anthologies on women’s political activism in the United States.

Martha A. Ackelsberg

Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial.

Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.

Judith Butler

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

What does sexual orientation mean if the very categories of gender are in question? How do we measure equality when our society's definitions of "male" and "female" leave out much of the population? There is no consensus on what a "real" man or woman is, where one's sex begins and ends, or what purpose the categories of masculine and feminine traits serve. While significant strides have been made in recent years on behalf of women's, gay and lesbian rights, there is still a large division between the law and day-to-day reality for LGBTQIA and female-identified individuals in American society. The practices, media outlets and institutions that privilege heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as "natural" need a closer examination.

Gender and Sexuality For Beginners considers the uses and limitations of biology in defining gender. Questioning gender and sex as both categories and forms of compulsory identification, it critically examines the issues in the historical and contemporary construction, meaning and perpetuation of gender roles. Gender and Sexuality For Beginners interweaves neurobiology, psychology, feminist, queer and trans theory, as well as historical gay and lesbian activism to offer new perspectives on gender inequality, ultimately pointing to the clear inadequacy of gender categories and the ways in which the sex-gender system oppresses us all. 

Gender and Sexuality For Beginners examines the evolution of gender roles and definitions of sexual orientation in American society, illuminating how neither is as objective or "natural" as we are often led to believe.

Jaimee Garbacik

Gender and Sexuality For Beginners

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and
postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the
scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on
the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or
transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

Susan R. Grayzel

Gender and the Great War

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics.

Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly―and uniquely―considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered?

Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.

Laura Sjoberg

Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives

In 1910, Norman Angell instructed political leaders that, in a world of increasing economic interdependence, war could never “avail us anything” and that, therefore, any state that made war would be foolishly casting aside its self-interest.¹ A few years later, World War I resulted in an unprecedented level of human casualties and economic devastation. When the United States joined the war, then-President Woodrow Wilson famously declared World War I the “war to end all wars.”

Laura Sjoberg

Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War

Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. What must we do to work out who we are, and where we belong? How do we find the space to grow, unite and confront the systems of oppression? This conflict can be found in the fissures between the body, gender and identity. Too often, the glitch is considered a mistake, a faulty overlaying, a bug in the system; in contrast, Russell compels us to find liberation here. In a radical call to arms, Legacy Russell argues that we need to embrace the glitch in order to break down the binaries and limitations that define gender, race, sexuality.

Glitch Feminism is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilises and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.

Legacy Russell

Glitch Feminism A Manifesto

This book argues that homophobia plays a fundamental role in disputes for hegemony between antagonists during political transitions. Examining countries not often connected in the same research-Colombia and South Africa-the book asserts that homophobia, as a form of gender and sexual violence, contributes to the transformation of gender and sexual orders required by warfare and deployed by armed groups. Anti-homosexual violence also reinforces the creation of consensus around these projects of change. The book considers the perspective of individuals and their organizations, for whom such hatreds are part of the embodied experience of violence caused by protracted conflicts and social inequalities. Resistance to that violence are reason to mobilize and become political actors. This book contributes to the increasing interest in South-South comparative analyses and the need of theory building based on case-study analyses, offering systematic research useful for grass root organizations, practitioners, and policy makers.

José Fernando Serrano-Amaya

Homophobic Violence in Armed Conflict and Political Transition

The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.

Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

In this engaging study, Dr Amina Wadud, an Afro-American Muslim herself, introduces the feminist movement in Islam and delves into its challenges, its textual foundations in the Qur'an and its achievements. Beginning with her own place in the effort for greater justice for women in Islam, Wadud goes on tackle a number of pertinent issues, including the state of Muslim women's studies as a discipline in mainstream academia and the role of Muslim women in the domestic space.

Amina Wadud

Inside The Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam

What happens when angry young rebels become wary older women, raging in a leaner, meaner time: a time which exalts only the “new,” when the ruling orthodoxy daily disparages everything associated with the “old”? Delving into her own life and those who left their mark on it, Lynne Segal journeys through time to consider her generation of female dreamers, the experiences that formed them, what they have left to the world, and how they are remembered in a period when pessimism pervades public life. Searching for answers, she studies her family history, sexual awakening, and ethnicity, as well as the peculiarities of the time and place that shaped her political journey, with all its urgency, significance, pleasures and absurdities.

Lynne Segal

Making Trouble Life and Politics

B. Ruby Rich designated a brand new genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC), in her groundbreaking article in the Village Voice in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists.

As a critic, curator, journalist, and scholar, Rich has been inextricably linked to the New Queer Cinema from its inception. This volume presents her new thoughts on the topic, as well as bringing together the best of her writing on the NQC. She follows this cinematic movement from its origins in the mid-1980s all the way to the present in essays and articles directed at a range of audiences, from readers of academic journals to popular glossies and weekly newspapers. She presents her insights into such NQC pioneers as Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien and investigates such celebrated films as Go Fish, Brokeback Mountain, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and Milk. In addition to exploring less-known films and international cinemas (including Latin American and French films and videos), she documents the more recent incarnations of the NQC on screen, on the web, and in art galleries.

B. Ruby Rich

New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut

Nonviolent action is the most promising method of moving beyond capitalism to a more humane social and economic system. How can this be achieved? Nonviolence versus Capitalism offers a systematic approach, starting with an analysis of capitalism from the viewpoint of nonviolence, outlining nonviolent economic alternatives and describing what is involved in a nonviolence strategy. A check list for activists is proposed and used to assess diverse campaigns, including workers' struggles, sabotage, environmental campaigns, social defence, global campaigns and economic alternatives.

Brian Martin

Nonviolence Versus Capitalism

Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations discusses a) how feminist analyses allow for and encourage the re-conceptualization of concepts and ideas once thought familiar from traditional ethical and political philosophy, and b) traditional political topics and issues through pacifist and feminist lenses. The chapters that focus on the former explore the possibility of "queering" such concepts as autonomy, violence, resistance, peace, religion, and politics, while the chapters that focus on the latter bring feminist and pacifist sensibilities and arguments to bear on classic political questions such as when and how violence and war are justified, the appropriateness of various responses to climate change, and the correct way to engage with such topics and themes in educational, institutional settings.

Jennifer Kling

Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism

There is a huge volume of work on war and its causes, most of which treats its political and economic roots. In Loving and Hating War: An Approach to Peace Education, Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war: nationalism, hatred, delight in spectacles, masculinity, religious extremism, and the search for existential meaning. She argues that while schools can do little to reduce the economic and political causes, they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by helping students understand the forces that manipulate them.

Nel Noddings

Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War

Ho-Won Jeong explains and assesses major approaches to dealing with ethnic conflict, communal violence, inter-state war and social injustice. The book analyses not only the sources of violence and conflict, but also how to manage and prevent them. As peace is relevant to improvement in human well-being and the future survival of humanity, the volume encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from alternative security policies, methods of peaceful settlement, human rights, self-determination, environmental politics, global governance and non-violence. Reflecting on the current thinking and drawing lessons from the past, the book can be considered as the most authoritative introduction to the field since the end of the Cold War.

Ho-Wong Jeong

Peace and Conflict Studies: An Introduction

Johan Galtung, one of the founders of modern peace studies, provides a wide-ranging panorama of the ideas, theories and assumptions on which the study of peace is based.

The book is organized in four parts, each examining the one of the four major theoretical approaches to peace. The first part covers peace theory, exploring the epistemological assumptions of peace. In Part Two conflict theory is examined with an exploration of nonviolent and creative handling of conflict. Developmental theory is discussed in Part Three, exploring structural violence, particularly in the economic field, together with a consideration of the ways of overcoming that violence. The fourth part is devoted to civilization theory.

Johan Galtung

Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Judith Butler

Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Since the early 1980s John Paul Lederach has traveled worldwide as a mediation trainer and conflict resolution consultant. Currently the director of the International Conciliation Committee, he has worked with governments, justice departments, youth programs, and other groups in Latin America, the Philippines, Cambodia, as well as Asia and Africa. Lederach blends a special training method in mediation with a tradition derived from his work in development. Throughout the book, he uses anecdote and pertinent experiences to demonstrate his resolution techniques. With an emphasis on the exchange involved in negotiation, Lederach conveys the key to successful conflict resolution: understanding how to guide disputants, transform their conflicts, and launch a process that empowers them.

John Paul Lederach

Preparing For Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures

A much-needed collection that thinks through power, desire, and human liberation. These pieces are sure to raise the level of debate about sexuality, gender, and the ways that they tie in with struggles against our ruling institutions." - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Outlaw Woman"

"Against the austerity of straight politics, "Queering Anarchism "sketches the connections between gender mutiny, queer sexualities, and anti-authoritarian desires. Through embodied histories and incendiary critique, the contributors gathered here show how we must not stop at smashing the state; rather normativity itself is the enemy of all radical possibility." - Eric A. Stanley, "Captive Genders"

What does it mean to "queer" the world around us? How does the radical refusal of the mainstream codification of GLBT identity as a new gender norm come into focus in the context of anarchist theory and practice? How do our notions of orientation inform our politics - and vice versa? "Queering Anarchism "brings together a diverse set of writings ranging from the deeply theoretical to the playfully personal that explore the possibilities of the concept of "queering," turning the dominant, and largely heteronormative, structures of belief and identity entirely inside-out. Ranging in topic from the economy to disability, politics, social structures, sexual practice, interpersonal relationships, and beyond, the authors here suggest that queering might be more than a set of personal preferences - pointing toward the possibility of an entirely new way of viewing the world.

Contributors include Jamie Heckert, Sandra Jeppesen, Ben Shepard, Ryan Conrad, Jerimarie Liesegang, Jason Lydon, Susan Song, Stephanie Grohmann, Liat Ben-Moshe, Anthony J. Nocella, A.J. Withers, and more.

C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon and Abbey Volcano are anarchists and activists who work in a wide variety of radical, feminist, and queer communities across the United States.

C.B. Daring

Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire

From consciousness-raising groups to hair-razing punk rockers, a fascinating window into the development of the women's movement, in the words of the women who moved it. Spanning the century, these classic essays contextualize feminism as a larger politics of liberation and equality. Whether it's Emma Goldman's attack on suffrage, the infamous Second Wave debates, or armed struggle group Rote Zora's call for direct action, critical analysis and biting polemic connect the dots to show not just how anarchism influenced feminism, but how feminism changed—and continues to change—the political landscape around it. Includes key essays "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and "The Tyranny of Tyranny" which broke open the feminist debate on organizing in the 1970s.

Dark Star Collective

Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader

From the authors of the New York Times bestselling book Rad American Women A–Z, comes a bold new collection of forty biographical profiles, each accompanied by a striking illustrated portrait, showcasing extraordinary women from around the world.

In Rad Women Worldwide, writer Kate Schatz and artist Miriam Klein Stahl tell fresh, engaging, and inspiring tales of perseverance and radical success by pairing well researched and riveting biographies with powerful and expressive cut-paper portraits. Featuring an array of diverse figures from Hatshepsut (the great female king who ruled Egypt peacefully for two decades) and Malala Yousafzi (the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize) to Poly Styrene (legendary teenage punk and lead singer of X-Ray Spex) and Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft (polar explorers and the first women to cross Antarctica), this progressive and visually arresting book is a compelling addition to women's history.

Kate Schatz

Rad Women Worldwide Artists and Athletes, Pirates and Punks, and Other Revolutionaries Who Shaped History

Thanks to Title IX cases, #MeToo, and #Times Up, the issue of rape seems to be constantly in the news. But our thinking on the subject has a long history, one that cultural critic Mithu Sanyal elegantly reconstructs. She narrates a history spanning from Lucretia—whose legendary rape and suicide was said to be the downfall of the last Roman king—to second-wave feminism, Tarzan, and Roman Polanski.

Sanyal demonstrates that the way we understand rape is remarkably (and alarmingly) consistent across the ages, even though the world has changed beyond recognition. It is high time for a new and informed debate about sexual violence, sexual boundaries, and consent.

Mithu Sanyal shows that our comprehension of rape is closely connected to our understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender. Why is it that we expect victims to be irreparably damaged? When we think of rapists, why do we think of strangers rather than uncles, husbands, priests, or boyfriends? And in the era of #MeToo, what should “justice” look like?

Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo examines the role of race and the recurrent image of the black rapist, the omission of male victims, and what we mean when we talk about “rape culture.” Sanyal takes on every received opinion we have about rape, arguing with liberals, conservatives, and feminists alike.

Mithu Sanyal

Rape From Lucretia to #MeToo

Rebel Crossings relates the interweaving lives of four women and two men as they journey from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from Britain to America, and from Old World conventions toward New World utopias. Radicalised by the rise of socialism, Helena Born, Miriam Daniell, Gertrude Dix, Robert Nicol and William Bailie cross the Atlantic dreaming of liberty and equality. The hope for a new age is captured in the name Miriam and Robert give their love child, born shortly after their arrival: Sunrise. A young Bostonian, Helen Tufts learns of Miriam’s defiant spirit through her close friendship with Helena; the love she feels for Helena and later for William fundamentally alters her life.

All six are part of a wider historical search for self-fulfillment and an alternative to a cruelly competitive capitalism. In articles, poems and allegories Helena, Helen and Miriam resist the cultural constraints women face, while female characters in Gertrude’s novels struggle to combine personal happiness with radical social commitment. William campaigns against class inequality as a socialist and an anarchist while longing to read and study. Robert, the former union militant, becomes preoccupied with personal growth and mystical enlightenment in the wilds of California.

Rebel Crossings offers fascinating perspectives on the historical interaction of feminism, socialism, and anarchism and on the incipient consciousness of a new sense of self, so vital for women seeking emancipation. These six lives bring fresh slants on political and cultural movements and upon influential individuals like Walt Whitman, Eleanor Marx, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Patrick Geddes and Benjamin Tucker. It is a work of significant originality by one of our leading feminist historians and speaks to the dilemmas of our own time.

Sheila Rowbotham

Rebel Crossings New Women, Free Lovers, and Radicals in Britain and the United States

Do you have to think that prostitution is good to support sex worker rights? How do sex worker rights fit with feminist and anti-capitalist politics? Is criminalising clients progressive—and can the police deliver justice?

In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.

Juno Mac and Molly Smith

Revolting Prostitutes The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action. Through interviews with key revolutionary scholars, Bhandar and Ziadah present a thorough discussion of how anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminisms are crucial to building effective political coalitions. Collectively, these interviews with leading scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Silvia Federici, and many others, trace the ways in which black, indigenous, post-colonial and Marxian feminisms have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another. Focusing on migration, neo-imperial militarism, the state, the prison industrial complex, social reproduction and many other pressing themes, the range of feminisms traversed in this volume show how freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and our psychic and symbolic worlds.

The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

Revolutionary Feminisms Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought

More than a century after they first entered the mainstream, bicycles and the culture around them are as accessible as ever—but for women, that progress has always been a struggle to achieve, and even now the culture remains overwhelmingly male. In Revolutions, author Hannah Ross highlights the stories of extraordinary women cyclists and all-female cycling groups over time and around the world, and demonstrates both the feminist power of cycling and its present-day issues.

A cyclist herself, Ross puts a spotlight on the many incredible women and girls on bicycles from then to now—many of whom had to endure great opposition to do so, beginning in the 1880s, when the first women began setting distance records, racing competitively, and using bicycles to spread the word about women’s suffrage. Revolutions also celebrates women setting records and demanding equality in competitive cycling, as well as cyclists in countries including Afghanistan, India, and Saudi Arabia who are inspiring women to take up space on the road, trails, and elsewhere.

Both a history of women's cycling and an impassioned manifesto, Revolutions challenges a male-dominated narrative that has long prevailed in cycling and celebrates the excellence of women in the culture.

Hannah Ross

Revolutions How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of feminist approaches to questions of violence, justice, and peace.

The volume argues that critical feminist thinking is necessary to analyse core peace and conflict issues and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and promoting peaceful conflict transformation. Contributions to the volume consider questions at the intersection of feminism, gender, peace, justice, and violence through interdisciplinary perspectives. The handbook engages with multiple feminisms, diverse policy concerns, and works with diverse theoretical and methodological contributions.

The volume covers the gendered nature of five major themes:

• Methodologies and genealogies (including theories, concepts, histories, methodologies)

• Politics, power, and violence (including the ways in which violence is created, maintained, and reproduced, and the gendered dynamics of its instantiations)

• Institutional and societal interventions to promote peace (including those by national, regional, and international organisations, and civil society or informal groups/bodies)

• Bodies, sexualities, and health (including sexual health, biopolitics, sexual orientation)

• Global inequalities (including climate change, aid, global political economy).

This handbook will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, security studies, feminist studies, gender studies, international relations, and politics.

Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Cecilia Confortini

Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research

SCUM Manifesto was considered one of the most outrageous, violent and certifiably crazy tracts when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published this work just before her rampage against the king of Pop Art made her a household name and resulted in her confinement to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as unhinged. In fact, the work has indisputable prescience, not only as a radical feminist analysis light-years ahead of its timepredicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against under-representation in the artsbut also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman.

The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of the work, but on Avital Ronell's incisive introduction, "Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas." Here is a reconsideration of Solanas's infamous text in light of her social milieu, Derrida's "The Ends of Man" (written in the same year), Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, Nietzsche's Ubermensch and notorious feminist icons from Medusa, Medea and Antigone, to Lizzie Borden, Lorenna Bobbit and Aileen Wournos, illuminating the evocative exuberance of Solanas's dark tract.

Avital Ronell

SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas Introduction

Feminist Christine Delphy co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions féministes with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s and became one of the most influential figures in French feminism. Today, Delphy remains a prominent and controversial feminist thinker, a rare public voice denouncing the racist motivations of the government’s 2011 ban of the Muslim veil. Castigating humanitarian liberals for demanding the cultural assimilation of the women they are purporting to “save,” Delphy shows how criminalizing Islam in the name of feminism is fundamentally paradoxical.

Separate and Dominate is Delphy’s manifesto, lambasting liberal hypocrisy and calling for a fluid understanding of political identity that does not place different political struggles in a false opposition. She dismantles the absurd claim that Afghanistan was invaded to save women, and that homosexuals and immigrants alike should reserve their self-expression for private settings. She calls for a true universalism that sacrifices no one at the expense of others. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, her arguments appear more prescient and pressing than ever.

Christine Delphy

Separate and Dominate Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror

Using the Peruvian internal armed conflict as a case study, this book examines wartime rape and how it reproduces and reinforces existing hierarchies. Jelke Boesten argues that effective responses to sexual violence in wartime are conditional upon profound changes in legal frameworks and practices, institutions, and society at large.

Jelke Boesten

Sexual Violence during War and Peace: Gender, Power, and Post-Conflict Justice in Peru

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the author makes clear, the anti-authoritarian movement took more thorough­going and trenchant forms in West Germany than anywhere else. A new sexual morality was not only preached but practised.

Is it possible, however – the author asks – that this new emphasis on sexual enlight­enment and liberty can become merely a characteristic of Western capitalism, which serves to activate the market economy, deflect rebellion, and hence contribute to the preservation of the system? In answering this question Reiche explains and develops Marcuse’s widely misunderstood concept of ‘repressive desublimation’. He exposes the artificial and illusory nature of many attempts – in Germany and elsewhere – at ‘sexual liberation’, and shows why it is impossible to overcome sexual oppression and mystification in our society in isolation from the political struggle.

Reimut Reiche

Sexuality and Class Struggle

In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained.

Jacqueline Rose

Sexuality in the Field of Vision

First published in the March 1971 International Socialist Review under the title 'American Feminism, 1848-1920

Debby Woodroofe

Sisters in struggle 1848-1920

A manifesto of sexual liberation, from the leading feminist thinker

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? This is the central question of Straight Sex, Lynne Segal’s account of twenty-five years of feminist thinking on sexuality. Covering the thought of sixties-era sexual liberationists, alongside the ensuing passionate debates over sex and love within feminist and lesbian communities, Segal covers certain shifts toward greater sexual conservatism in the eighties. Straight Sex examines an array of issues, including sex as a subversive activity, the “liberated orgasm,” sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, queer politics, anti-pornography campaigns and the rise of the moral right.

Lynne Segal

Straight Sex Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure

A collection of essays by theorists in culture and politics. Experts from a variety of fields re-examine the origins of the subject as understood by Descartes, Kant and Hegel, and consider contemporary ideas that revive the subject, including queer theory and national identity.

Joan Copjec

Supposing the Subject Edited

This book investigates cultural and social identity in contemporary complex societies, focusing especially on Eastern Europe. Mach explains the role of symbols and symbolic forms in he relations between groups and the protection and development of their identities, especially ethnic identity. He places his study within the context of social order and the structure of power, using case studies which deal especially with the significance of politics, state rituals and national identity (Great Britain, Israel, Russia, Poland); in the conflict and displacement of migrating groups (Polish and German); and in regional questions of identity and inter-ethnic relations (Poland, United States, Great Britain).

Mach presents a clear conceptual framework for analyzing the symbolic construction of identity. He views cultural identity as a dynamic, creative process which clarifies issues that are particularly significant in contemporary society, such as nationalism, new ethnicity, minority culture, and the cultural dimension of political conflicts.

Zdzislaw Mach

Symbols, Conflict, and Identity: Essays in Political Anthropology

As the gay mainstream ironically prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value. That's Revolting shows us what the new queer resistance looks like. Edited by the instigator of San Francisco's Gay Shame and with contributions from the likes of Charlie Anders, Patrick Califia, and Carol Queen, the collection challenges the commercialized, commodified, and hyper-objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community outside of traditional models. It is both a blueprint and a call to action, bringing the post-identity politics of a new generation of pissed-off queers to a wider audience. Now revised and updated.

Matt Bernstein Sycamore

That's Revolting! Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives—such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction—has led to a decrease in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

Alex S. Vitale

The End of Policing

Even the best books on international history are ignorant of the secret war against the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union waged jointly by the Caucasian peoples and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores and exposes previously unknown passages in Eurasian international history. Although the secret war ultimately failed in liberating the Caucasian peoples, the lessons of this Eurasian collaboration were not lost on the United States, which after World War II confronted the Soviet Union just as Japan had earlier. Washington copied the strategy of its former enemy and developed it further. The Eurasian triangle of Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan is a forgotten history of cardinal importance that, stretching from the Russo-Japanese War to World War II, influenced Western Cold War strategies. This book is also the story of a friendship rare in international politics between two unlikely partners unspoiled by political vicissitudes.

Hiroaki Kuromiya

The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

The Feminist Porn Book brings together for the first time writings by feminists in the adult industry and research by feminist porn scholars. 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.

"Finally the time is right for feminist porn! This stunning collection by academics and artists in dialogue accounts for the massive changes in technology, erotics, modes of spectatorship, and embodied identities which impact the world of pornography. As this volume demonstrates, we are now far from the sex wars of the 1980s, the sex panics of the 1990s, and well into a new era of erotic representation. In order to make sense of new and emergent worlds of desiring bodies, trans-femininities and trans-masculinities, transgressive racial performance, and the erotics of disabled bodies, read The Feminist Porn Book , and when you are finished, go out and make some porn!"—Jack Halberstam

Tristan Taormino (Editor); Constance Penley (Editor); Celine Parrenas Shimizu (Editor); Mireille Miller-Young (Editor)

The Feminist Porn Book The Politics of Producing Pleasure

With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible?

Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

Judith Levine, Erica R. Meiners

The Feminist and the Sex Offender Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Judith Butler

The Force of Nonviolence An Ethico-Political Bind

The Caucasus mountains rise at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. A land of astonishing natural beauty and a dizzying array of ancient cultures, the Caucasus for most of the twentieth century lay inside the Soviet Union, before movements of national liberation created newly independent countries and sparked the devastating war in Chechnya. Charles King reveals how tsars, highlanders, revolutionaries, and adventurers have contributed to the fascinating history of this borderland, providing an indispensable guide to the complicated histories, politics, and cultures of this intriguing frontier. Based on new research in multiple languages, the book shows how the struggle for freedom in the mountains, hills, and plains of the Caucasus has been a perennial theme over the last two hundred years-a struggle which has led to liberation as well as to new forms of captivity. The book sheds valuable light on the origins of modern disputes, including the ongoing war in Chechnya, conflicts in Georgia and Azerbaijan, and debates over oil from the Caspian Sea and its impact on world markets.

Charles King

The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus

The Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting their day-to-day struggles, their experiences of education, work and health care, and the personal and political struggles they have waged to preserve a sense of identity and community. First published in 1985 and winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize that year, The Heart of the Race is a testimony to the collective experience of black women in Britain, and their relationship to the British state throughout its long history of slavery, empire and colonialism.

This new edition includes a foreword by Lola Okolosie and an interview with the authors, chaired by Heidi Safia Mirza, focusing on the impact of their book since publication and its continuing relevance today

Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe

The Heart of the Race Black Women’s Lives in Britain

The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy.

Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.

Holly Lewis

The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. 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.

Judith Halberstam

The Queer Art of Failure

The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 is a landmark publication that provides the most coherent overview of women’s role and place in western Europe, spanning the era from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the twentieth century.

In this collection of essays, leading women's historians counter the notion of ‘national’ histories and provide the insight and perspective of a European approach. Important intellectual, political and economic developments have not respected national boundaries, nor has the story of women’s past, or the interplay of gender and culture.

The interaction between women, ideology and female agency, the way women engaged with patriarchal and gendered structures and systems, and the way women carved out their identities and spaces within these informs the writing in this book.

For any student of women’s studies or European history, The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 will prove an informative addition to their studies.

Deborah Simonton

The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700

Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and otherness.  This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation. Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and inspire generations of men and women to come.

Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex

A highly original account of the evolution of the family unit.

Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family arrangements in American history, from Native American kin groups to the emergence of the dominant middle-class family ideal in the 1890s.

Surveying and synthesizing a vast range of previous scholarship, as well as engaging more particular studies of family life from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Coontz offers a highly original account of the shifting structure and function of American families. Her account challenges standard interpretations of the early hegemony of middle-class privacy and “affective individualism,” pointing to the rich tradition of alternative family behaviors among various ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America, and arguing that even middle-class families went through several transformations in the course of the nineteenth centure.

The present dominant family form, grounded in close interpersonal relations and premised on domestic consumption of mass-produced household goods has arisen, Coontz argues, from a long and complex series of changing political and economic conjunctures, as well as from the destruction or incorporation of several alternative family systems. A clear conception of American capitalism’s combined and uneven development is therefore essential if we are to understand the history of the family as a key social and economic unit. Lucid and detailed, The Social Origins of Private Life is likely to become the standard history of its subject.

Stephanie Coontz

The Social Origins of Private Life A History of American Families 1600-1900

War is a highly complex and dynamic form of social conflict. This new book demonstrates the importance of using sociological tools to understand the changing character of war and organised violence. The author offers an original analysis of the historical and contemporary impact that coercion and warfare have on the transformation of social life, and vice versa. Although war and violence were decisive components in the formation of modernity most analyses tend to shy away from the sociological study of the gory origins of contemporary social life. In contrast, this book brings the study of organised violence to the fore by providing a wide-ranging sociological analysis that links classical and contemporary theories with specific historical and geographical contexts. Topics covered include violence before modernity, warfare in the modern age, nationalism and war, war propaganda, battlefield solidarity, war and social stratification, gender and organised violence, and the new wars debate.

Sinisa Malasevic

The Sociology of War and Violence

Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women’s bodies and women’s lives. People—of any and no gender—have protested and theorised, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an “I” and loudly proclaimed that there is a “we.” The Verso Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.

Global in scope, The Verso Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China’s Tang Dynasty to accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus’s expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote to the revolutionary pétroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first-century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the sixth century and the ninteenth century to radical queer politics in the twentieth and twenty-first

Jessie Kindig

The Verso Book of Feminism Revolutionary Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion

John A. Vasquez’s The War Puzzle provided one of the most important scientific analyses of the causes of war of the last two decades. The War Puzzle Revisited updates and extends his groundbreaking work, reviewing recent research on the onset and expansion of war and the conditions of peace. Vasquez describes systematically those factors associated with wars to see if there is a pattern that suggests why war occurs, and how it might be avoided, delineating the typical path by which relatively equal states have become embroiled in wars in the modern global system. The book uses the large number of empirical findings generated in the last twenty-five years as the basis of its theorizing, and integrates these research findings so as to advance the scientific knowledge of war and peace.

John A. Vazquez

The War Puzzle Revisited

Injustice should not simply be accepted as “the way things are.” This is the starting point for The Xenofeminist Manifesto, a radical attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century.

Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitable—from the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself.

If nature is unjust, change nature!

Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto A Politics for Alienation

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics.

Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive.

Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.

Juliet Jacques

Trans A Memoir

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.

After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor

Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of contemporary terrorists.

Violence, Žižek states, takes three forms--subjective (crime, terror), objective (racism, hate-speech, discrimination), and systemic (the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems)--and often one form of violence blunts our ability to see the others, raising complicated questions.

Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of "the neighbour"? And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think?

Beginning with these and other equally contemplative questions, Žižek discusses the inherent violence of globalization, capitalism, fundamentalism, and language, in a work that will confirm his standing as one of our most erudite and incendiary modern thinkers.

Slavoj Zizek

Violence

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war, yet our understanding of the relationship between gender and war is confused. Joshua Goldstein analyzes the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. He concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often mold men, women, and children to the needs of the war system.

Joshua S. Goldstein

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa

What if we took sex out of the box marked “special,” the contents of which are either the worst or best thing a person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of human life in general? In this extraordinary book, and in defiance of the long-standing media obsessions that turn every sexual topic into a morality tale of monsters and victims, shame and virtue, journalist JoAnn Wypijewski does exactly that.

From the criminalization of HIV to the frenzy over “pedophile priests,” from unexamined assumptions about the murder of Matthew Shepard to the accusations made against Woody Allen, from Brett Kavanaugh to Abu Ghraib, Wypijewski takes some of the most famous stories of recent decades and turns them inside out. The result is a searing indictment of modern sexual politics. She exposes the myriad ways moral panic and a punitive culture are intertwined, considering along the way the nature of pleasure, censorship, self-deception, memory and much more.

What emerges is a picture of a culture in which crude morality plays acted out in the media have contributed to an imprisoning embrace of the repressive power of the state. Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, Wypijewski insists, and so must sexual politics, if it is to make any sense at all.

JoAnn Wypijewski

What We Don’t Talk About Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life

This work explores the place of feminism in contemporary culture. For some, feminism is the favourite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, it is the greatest success story of the closing century.
Abstract: aeoA comprehensive and lively exploration of feminism in the contemporary world. aeo Examines the shifts in feminist thinking from the emergence of womana s Liberation through to the present day. aeo Provides a vigorous defence of feminism but criticizes some of more a fashionablea accounts of gender relations

Lynne Segal

Why feminism? : gender, psychology, politics

Witch, Slut, Feminist: these contested identities are informing millennial women as they counter a tortuous history of misogyny with empowerment. This innovative primer highlights sexual liberation as it traces the lineage of “witch feminism” through art, film, music, fashion, literature, technology, religion, pop culture, and politics. Juxtaposing scholarly research on the demonization of women and female sexuality that has continued since the witch hunts of the early modern era with pop occulture analyses and interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and practitioners of witchcraft, this book addresses and illuminates contemporary conversations about reproductive rights, sexual pleasure, queer identity, pornography, sex work, and more. Author Kristen J. Sollee elucidates the ways in which women have been persecuted for their perceived connection with witchcraft, and how they have fought back, harnessing the legacy of the witch for revolutionary means

Kristen J. Sollee

Witches, Sluts, Feminists Conjuring the Sex Positive

Are Islamic societies inherently oppressive to women? Is the trend among Islamic women to appear once again in veils and other traditional clothing a symbol of regression or an effort to return to a “pure” Islam that was just and fair to both sexes? In this book Leila Ahmed adds a new perspective to the current debate about women and Islam by exploring its historical roots, tracing the developments in Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancient world to the present.
 
In order to distinguish what was distinctive about the earliest Islamic doctrine on women, Ahmed first describes the gender systems in place in the Middle East before the rise of Islam. She then focuses on those Arab societies that played a key role in elaborating the dominant Islamic discourses about women and gender: Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded; Iraq during the classical age, when the prescriptive core of legal and religious discourse on women was formulated; and Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when exposure to Western societies led to dramatic social change and to the emergence of new discourses on women. Throughout, Ahmed not only considers the Islamic texts in which central ideologies about women and gender developed or were debated but also places this discourse in its social and historical context. Her book is thus a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and the historical circumstances of their position in society, the first such discussion using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies.

Leila Ahmed

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate

Rawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.

Afsaneh Najmabadi

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

This edited volume explores the everyday struggles and challenges of women living in the South Caucasus. The primary aim of the collection is to shift the pre-occupation with geopolitical analysis in the region and to share new empirical research on women and social change. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics, each relating to women’s everyday challenges during periods (past and present) of turbulent transformation and conflict, thus helping make sense of these transformations as well as adding new empirical insights to larger questions on life in the South Caucasus. Part I begins the discussion of women and social change in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan by examining the contradictions between traditional gender roles and emancipation and how they continue to dictate women’s lives. Part II focuses on women’s experiences of war and conflict in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Nagorny Karabakh, as well as displacement from Abkhazia and Azerbaijan. Part III examines the challenges faced by sexual minorities in Georgia and feminist activism in Azerbaijan.

Women's Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, gender studies and history.

Ulrike Ziemer

Women's Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus

A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.

Angela Y.Davis

Women, Race & Class

“To some a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable, phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality, but share a belief that these phenomena did have social origins, origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and processes.”

In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent years.

Women’s Work, Men’s Property brings together specialist historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of labor, the nature of pre-state kinship societies, the position of women in slave-based societies, and the specific forms taken by the oppression of women in archaic Greece.

Men’s Work, Women’s Property will be welcomed by teachers and students of women’s studies and anyone with an interest in the biological, psychological and historical roots of sexual inequality.

Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson

Women’s Work, Men’s Property The Origins of Gender and Class Edited

bottom of page