Εργαστήριο Σπουδών Φύλου και Ισότητας

This book takes the process of "reading the body" into fields at the forefront of culture -- the vast spaces mapped by science and technology -- to show that the body in a high-tech world is as gendered as ever. From female bodybuilding to virtual reality images, from cosmetic surgery to cyberpunk, from reproductive medicine to public health policies to TV science programs, Anne Balsamo articulates the key issues concerning the status of the body for feminist cultural studies in a postmodern world. Technologies of the Gendered Body combine close readings of popular texts-- such as Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, the movie Pumping Iron II:The Women, cyberpunk magazines, and mass media-- with analyses of medical literature, public policy documents, and specific technological practices. Balsamo describes the ways in which certain biotechnologies are ideologically shaped by gender considerations and other beliefs about race, physical abilities, and economic and legal status. She presents a view of the conceptual system that structures individuals' access to and participation in these technologies, as well as an overview of individuals' rights and responsibilities in this sometimes baffling area. Examining the ways in which the body is gendered in its interactions with new technologies of corporeality, Technologies of the Gendered Body counters the claim that in our scientific culture the material body has become obsolete.

Building Bodies is an arresting collection of articles that construct theoretical models in which power, bodies, discourse, and subjectivity interact in a space we can call the "built" body, a dynamic, politicized, and biological site. Contributors discuss the complex relationship between body building and masculinity, between the built body and the racialized body, representations of female body builders in print and in film, and homoeroticism in body building. Linked by their focus on the sport and practice of body building, the authors in this volume challenge both the way their various disciplines (media studies, literary criticism, gender studies, film and sociology) have gone about studying bodies, and existing assumptions about the complex relationship between power, subjectivity, society, and the flesh. Body building - in practice, in representation, and in the cultural imagination - serves as an launching point because the sport and practice provide ready challenges to existing assumptions regarding what constitutes the "built" body.

In The Male Body, Susan Bordo offers a frank, sprightly, and, yes, educational look at the male nude as an index to attitudes about sexuality in the broth of media and pop culture in which, like it or not, we all stew. While the Greeks were unafraid to celebrate masculine beauty, men have been strangely sexless throughout most of Western history--until Hollywood rediscovered the male body when Marlon Brando first shed his T-shirt in "A Streetcar Named Desire". It's only been in the '90s, however, that the male image has gone so far as to reclaim its penis. From de facto censorship to near idolatry, never has ever an organ made such a journey in one brief decade? But it's not the penis alone that makes a man a man; perhaps, Bordo concludes, it's time for us to rethink our metaphors of manhood.

This book explores the complicated issue of gender in computer games-particularly the development of video games for girls. One side is the concern that the average computer game, being attractive primarily to boys, furthers the technology access gap between the genders. Yet attempts to create computer games that girls want to play brings about another set of concerns: should games be gendered at all? And does having boys' games and girls' games merely reinforce the way gender differences are socialized in play? Cassell and Jenkins have gathered the thoughts of several feminist and media scholars to explore the issues from multiple perspectives, but this is not a work confined to ivory-tower theorizing. Alongside the philosophical explorations are pragmatic investigations of the hard-nosed, real world of computer-game manufacture and sales. Particularly enlightening is a section featuring interviews with several leading creators of games for girls. And while all agree that it's good to be past the days when women in computer games were limited to scantily clad background figures or damsels in distress, the visions of an appropriate future are both diverse and well defended.

Western culture is replete with mythic figures that provide a self-representation of the symbolic order from which the culture is woven. The process can be traced back to ancient mythology, and can be found in all kinds of literary documents down through the ages, even in the modern period, or rather, in modern reaprorpiations of more ancient figures. In the beginning were the gods of Greek myth, then Homer's Odysseus and Polyphemus, then Oedipus in classical tragedy, not to mention the figures in the Bible. Later came Faust and Don Juan, or we could even add Cyrano and Whether. In fact, the mythic figure has the power to express in a concentrated way the symbolic order that shapes it. Indeed it is within the symbolic order that the figure takes on a signifying name (a proper name). It does this with a kind of immediate, story-like allusiveness, coming to life in a vital, paradigmatic way. Clearly, the symbolic order finds expression in other types of language, for example the philosophical treatises or legal documents. But the mythic figure is unique in its communicative force and in its capacity to stir up a sense of self recognition: it has the ongoing ability to adapt to the inner workings of the symbolic order like a living organism whose different traits become visible from various points of view that evolve over time.

Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as a socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual women's struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, this renewed interest has received mixed reactions from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition which evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing upon insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival".

This collection explores the growing range of body modification practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants, which have sprung up recently in the West. Contributors address the question of the permanence of the body transformation through fitness regimes and body building, and performance artists who explore the Western standard of beauty by experimenting on their own bodies. Also, the construction of the anatomy of a virtual body in Real Video Surgery and the Visible Human Project are explored.

Identity Without Selfhood proposes an original conception of identity and subjectivity in the context of recent post-structuralist and queer debates. The author argues that efforts to analyse and even 'deconstruct' identity and selfhood still rely on certain core Western techniques of identity such as individuality, boundedness, autonomy, self-realisation and narrative. In a detailed study of biographical, media and academic representations of Simone de Beauvoir, Dr Fraser illustrates that bisexuality, by contrast, is discursively produced as an identity which exceeds the confines of the self and especially the individuality ascribed to de Beauvoir. In the course of this analysis, she draws attention to the high costs incurred by processes of subjectification; in the light of these costs, while drawing substantially on and expanding Foucault's notion of the techniques of the self, the argument presented in the book also offers a critique of Foucault's work from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective.

For women born in the immediate post-war period there were the years BG and AG--"before Greer" and "after Greer". It's all too easy to underestimate its influence, but the fact is that in 1970 every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy of The Female Eunuch. Greer's book broke the ground that women of today stand on--her unique stance combined outrageous humour and assertiveness to lead the way forward for women who wanted to take control of their lives. Thirty years later in The Whole Woman, Greer is ready to get angry again. Picking up where she left off, she analyses the invasive ways in which the health industry persuades women, and seduces them into having their bodies and reproductive systems "managed". Greer lays out the facts about the high failure rate and devastating side effects of in-vitro fertilisation, and the incongruity between the "success" of breast implants in achieving the "perfect" mammary to please men and the continuing failures in detecting and treating increasingly prevalent breast cancer.

hrough an examination of the experience of transsexuals, this book enhances the understanding of how gender can and does function in powerful, complex and subtle ways. The author, who has herself been surgically reassigned, has conducted extensive interviews with transsexuals from many walks of life. Her personal experiences, which inform this book, have given her access to her subjects, access that others might be denied. While highlighting how the gender identity of transsexuals relates to hormonal and surgical changes in the body as well as to changes in dress, the book investigates the pressures and motivations to conform to expected gender roles, and the ways in which these are affected by social, educational, and professional status. Differences in the experiences of those who change from male to female and those who change from female to male are also examined. Sex reassignment has been the focus of considerable media attention recently, as increasing numbers of people feel able to talk frankly about their personal experiences with gender dysphoria. Strides with medical technology have given transsexuals new opportunities in their lives. This book provides unique insights into how these changes are seen by those people most affected by them.

Body Image presents a review of current literature and the results of some new research on body image. It compares the effects of gender, sexuality, social class, age and ethnicity on our satisfaction with the way we look and suggests how these differences arise. Why, for instance, are heterosexual men much happier with their body images than women or gay men? Sarah Grogan discusses the effect of media presentation of the ideal body and other cultural influences. Surprisingly, despite the almost exclusive media preference for very young female bodies, she finds that older women are not less satisfied with their bodies than younger women.

During the 1990s, Greece had a very high rate of abortion at the same time that its low birth rate was considered a national crisis. The Empty Cradle of Democracy explores this paradox. Alexandra Halkias shows that despite Greek Orthodox beliefs that abortion is murder, many Greek women view it as "natural" and consider birth control methods invasive. The formal public-sphere view is that women destroy the body of the nation by aborting future citizens. Scrutiny of these conflicting cultural beliefs enables Halkias's incisive critique of the cornerstones of modern liberal democracy, including the autonomous "individual" subject and a polity external to the private sphere. The Empty Cradle of Democracy examines the complex relationship between nationalism and gender and re-theorizes late modernity and violence by exploring Greek representations of human agency, the fetus, national identity, eroticism, and the divine. Halkias's analysis combines telling fragments of contemporary Athenian culture, Greek history, media coverage of abortion and the declining birth rate, and fieldwork in Athens at an obstetrics/gynecology clinic and a family-planning center. Halkias conducted in-depth interviews with one hundred and twenty women who had had two or more abortions and observed more than four hundred gynecological exams at a state family-planning center. She reveals how intimate decisions and the public preoccupation with the low birth rate connect to nationalist ideas of race, religion, freedom, resistance, and the fraught encounter between modernity and tradition. The Empty Cradle of Democracy is a startling examination of how assumptions underlying liberal democracy are betrayed while the nation permeates the body and understandings of gender and sexuality complicate the nation-building projects of late modernity.

Meatloaf, fried chicken, Jell-O, cake--because foods are so very common, we rarely think about them much in depth. The authors of Cooking Lessons however, believe that food is deserving of our critical scrutiny and that such analysis yields many important lessons about American society and its values. This book explores the relationship between food and gender. Contributors draw from diverse sources, both contemporary and historical, and look at women from various cultural backgrounds, including Hispanic, traditional southern White, and African American. Each chapter focuses on a certain food, teasing out its cultural meanings and showing its effect on women's identities and lives.

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Since 1981, AIDS has had an enormous impact upon the popular imagination. Few other diseases this century have been greeted with quite the same fear, loathing, and prejudice against those who develop it. The mass media, and in particular, the news media, have played a vital part in "making sense" of AIDS. This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cultural studies, history of medicine, and contemporary social theory to examine AIDS reporting. There have been three major themes dominating coverage: the "gay-plague" dominant in the early 1980s, panic-stricken visions of the end of the world as AIDS was said to pose a threat to everyone, in the late 1980s; and a growing routinising of coverage in the 1990s. This book lays bare the sub-textual ideologies giving meaning to AIDS news reports, including anxieties about pollution and contagion, deviance, bodily control, the moral meanings of risk, the valorisation of drugs and medical science. Drawing together the work of cultural and political theorists, sociologists and historians who have written about medicine, disease and the body, as well as that of theorists in Europe and the USA who have focused their attention specificaiiy on AIDS, this book explores the wide theoretical debate about the importance of language in the social construction of illness and disease. This text offers insights into the sociocultural context in which attitudes towards people with HIV or AIDS and people's perceptions of risk from HIV infection are developed as the responses of governments to the AIDS epidemic are formulated.

This book reassesses how women are talked about and constructed visually across a range of popular media. Arguing for the importance of a historical approach, this book examines continuities and changes in dominant myths of femininity, especially in the transition from the modern to the postmodern period. The influences of feminism and consumerism on these developments are given particular attention. The book starts with an orientating chapter on the contributions of a variety of disciplines to our understanding of gender in relation to the media. Psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, art history and cultural studies are each critically reviewed, enabling students to compare perspectives and to locate the variety of approaches they may encounter in other readings. A chapter on gender and consumerism and a detailed analysis of myths of femininity are also included. Outlining key theoretical debates in an accessible manner this book offers a wide range of examples from advertising, women's magazines, popular television programmes and mainstream film.

This collection of essays explores the effects of information technology on women's employment and the nature of women's work in the third world. Contributors discuss the challenges faced by women, along with their responses and organizing strategies, as they adjust to new technologies in less affluent communities. Also outlined are the roles that family, ideology, state policies and trade union structures can play in distributing information technology-related employment among women and men. Particular chapters highlight differences in the interests and needs of different groups of women, challenging the concept of a monolithic, specifically feminine vision of technology and science. The book provides a critique of postmodernism and ecofeminism and suggests ways in which modern technologies could promote gender equality in the developing world.

Building Bodies is an exciting collection of articles that strive toward constructing theoretical models in which power, bodies, discourse, and subjectivity interact in a space we can call the "built" body, a dynamic, politicized, and biological site. Contributors discuss the complex relationship between body building and masculinity, between the built body and the racialized body, representations of women body builders in print and in film, and homoeroticism in body building. Linked by their focus on the sport and practice of body building, the authors in this volume challenge both the way their various disciplines (media studies, literary criticism, gender studies, film and sociology) have gone about studying bodies, and existing assumptions about the complex relationship between power, subjectivity, society, and flesh. Body building - in practice, in representation, and in the cultural imagination - serves as an launching point because the sport and practice provide ready challenges to existing assumptions about the "built" body.

Servants of Globalization is a poignant and often troubling study of migrant Filipina domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the mothering and caretaking work of the global economy in countries throughout the world. It specifically focuses on the emergence of parallel lives among such workers in the cities of Rome and Los Angeles, two main destinations for Filipina migration. The book is largely based on interviews with domestic workers, but the book also powerfully portrays the larger economic picture as domestic workers from developing countries increasingly come to perform the menial labor of the global economy. This is often done at great cost to the relations with their own split-apart families. The experiences of migrant Filipina domestic workers are also shown to entail a feeling of exclusion from their host society, a downward mobility from their professional jobs in the Philippines, and an encounter with both solidarity and competition from other migrant workers in their communities. The author applies a new theoretical lens to the study of migration-the level of the subject, moving away from the two dominant theoretical models in migration literature, the macro and the intermediate. At the same time, she analyzes the three spatial terrains of the various institutions that migrant Filipina domestic workers inhabit--the local, the transnational, and the global. She draws upon the literature of international migration, sociology of the family, women's work, and cultural studies to illustrate the reconfiguration of the family community and social identity in migration and globalization. The book shows how globalization not only propels the migration of Filipina domestic workers but also results in the formation of parallel realities among them in cities with greatly different contexts of reception.

When one thinks of Edith Wharton, the grandeur of upper-class life in turn-of-the-century New York City is immediately conjured. Hanson cabs wait curbside in front of Washington Square townhouses. Chandeliers glow above the heads of waltzing couples. What does not come to mind immediately is the tough-mindedness of Wharton herself and the efforts she put forth on behalf of others. Alan Price illuminates this side of Wharton in The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Whartonand the First World War. During World War I, Wharton saved the lives of thousands of Belgian and French refugees. When the war began, the expatriated Wharton and Henry James saw any possible German victory as "the crash of civilisation", thus prompting their early involvement in the allied cause. In the opening weeks of the conflict, Wharton wrote war reportage at the front and organized relief efforts in Paris. Before the first year of the war was over, she had created organizations and raised funds for three major war charities that bore her name. As the war sank into a stalemate of trench warfare, Wharton continued to write magazine and newspaper articles, organize fundraising schemes, and rally the world's best painters, composers, and writers to raise money for her refugees and to sway American popular opinion. The End of the Age of Innocence tells the dramatic story of Wharton's heroic crusade to save the lives of displaced Belgians as well as the suffering citizens of her adopted France. It is a book that everyone who has ever read and loved Wharton's work will want to own.

"Both compelling and certain to be controversial...it is hard to resist her conclusion that many reproductive experiments can represent another form of violence against women. Highly recommended." Library Journal "A radical feminist's call for an end to reproductive...violence against women...Challenging ideas, expressed clearly and forcefully, that go provocatively against the grain." Kirkus Review

This short historical account of the Women's Studies programme at the Faculty of Arts of Utrecht University aims at celebrating 15 years of hard work, intellectual commitment and academic success. In a relatively brief span of time the department has managed to create a cutting-edge programme of education and research that enjoys a solid international reputation. Women's Studies at Utrecht University have constantly been on the move and it is still developing. This book both accounts for and reflects on the extraordinary adventure of the programme itself, the institution-building efforts of its team and the conditions that allowed it to flourish.

Since the 1970s, conflict studies and feminist studies have benefited greatly from a convergence of interest by widely different people, including practitioners, theorists, and researchers. The academic study of conflict, conflict management, and conflict resolution has grown, and applications of conflict resolution strategies have become integral to legal, corporate, and bureaucratic structures and widespread in personal and interpersonal problem solving. Concurrently, the 20th century women's movement brought major challenges to social and political organizations and changes in personal lives, at least in developed Western cultures. Yet, curiously, these developments have remained largely separate from each other. Although many, if not most, practitioners of interpersonal conflict management are women, most of those involved in the academic study of conflict and its resolution are not. This book covers different forms and contexts of conflict and includes chapters about theory and chapters about research. Taken as a whole, this book raises more questions than it answers and poses problems for which we have no definitive solutions. Yet, its questions and problems are of such consequence that we believe it important to stimulate dialogue that might lead to answers and solutions.

In an original and stimulating analysis of gender and AIDS, Tamsin Wilton assesses safer sex health promotion and health education discourse and considers their unintended consequences for the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Taking a queer/feminist constructionist position, she links issues of power, gender, sexuality, and nationalism in an attempt to offer a sound theoretical foundation for an effective and radical HIV/AIDS health promotion strategy. EnGendering AIDS draws on safer sex materials from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Scandinavia and sets current practice against the historical context of VD/STD education, dissecting the role played by STDs in the cultural construction of gender. Wilton debates the meanings that erotic minorities read into bodies and desires, and how these have been transformed by AIDS, and suggests a new model of pornography that disengages the sexually explicit and/or erotically arousing from gendered power relations. EnGendering AIDS suggests a radically innovative approach to the development of effective safer sex promotional strategies based on new thinking in health promotion and on the insights of both radical feminism and queer theory. This book will be of interest to professionals in health promotion and health education, and also to students and academics in womens studies, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, sexuality, cultural studies, media studies, social policy, and medical sociology.

In the early days of Pong and Pac Man, video games appeared to be little more than an idle pastime. Today, video games make up a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals television and film. The Video Game Theory Reader brings together exciting new work on the many ways video games are reshaping the face of entertainment and our relationship with technology. Drawing upon examples from widely popular games ranging from Space Invaders to Final Fantasy IX and Combat Flight Simulator 2, the contributors discuss the relationship between video games and other media; the shift from third- to first-person games; gamers and the gaming community; and the important sociological, cultural, industrial, and economic issues that surround gaming.