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Abelove, H., M. A. Barale, et al., Eds. (1993). The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York and London, Routledge.
The forty-two essays gathered here constitute some of the best and most significant recent English-language work in the field of lesbian/gay studies. They are derived from a wide variety of disciplines -- philosophy, classics, history, anthropology, sociology, African-American studies, ethnic studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. They produce and engage many different kinds of knowledge and meaning: they examine a range of topics and subjects for further inquiry demonstrating the cogency of different methods, theories, styles, and approaches: taken together, they transform our view of cultures and the world. As the essays collected here demonstrate, lesbian/gay studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Nor do they refer simply to studies undertaken by, or in the name of, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Not at all research into the lives of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men necessarily qualifies as lesbian/gay studies. Lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women's studies does for gender, continuing to furnish the categories of sexuality and gender with significance for discussions in both women studies and lesbian/gay studies: hence, the interface of boundaries between the fields of lesbian/ gay studies is a matter of lively debate and ongoing negotiation. Lesbian/gay studies attempts to decipher the sexual meanings inscribed in many different forms of cultural expression while also attempting to decipher the cultural meanings inscribed in the discourses and practices of sex.
Angelides, S. (2001). A History of Bisexuality. Chicago and London,
The University of Chicago Press.
Why is bisexuality the object of such scepticism? Why do sexologists steer clear of it in their research? Why has bisexuality, in stark contrast to homosexuality, only recently emerged as a nascent political and cultural identity? Bisexuality has been rendered as mostly irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality. With A History of Bisexuality, Steven Angelides explores the reasons why, and invites us to rethink our conceptions about sexual identity. Retracing the evolution of sexology, and revisiting modern epistemological categories of sexuality in psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory. Biology, and human genetics, Angelides argues that bisexuality has functioned historically as the structural other to sexual identity itself, undermining assumptions about heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Ashwin, S., Ed. (2000). Gender, State and Society in Soviet and
Post-Soviet Russia. London and New York, Routledge.
The attempt to supplant traditional gender roles was an important element of the Bolshevik drive to transform society in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This book explores the constitution of gender identity in the soviet system and examines the implications of the collapse of communism for the gender roles of both men and women. Gender, state and society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, addresses the important questions raised by the rise and fall of the soviet experiment in transforming gender relations. On the basis of qualitative research, the contributors analyze both the state prescription of gender roles and the active role of men and women in defining gender identities within the institutional parameters laid down by the state. This is one of the few English language studies to focus on men and masculinity, something which is vital to understanding gender relations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia.
Balsamo, A. (1999). Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborn Women. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
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.
Beemyn, B. and M. Eliason, Eds. (1996). Queer Studies: A Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Anthology. New York and London, New
York University Press.
Despite the recent publishing boom in queer studies, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are overly complex theoretical books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. To date, there has been no general, accessible, and inclusive work suitable for use as an introduction to queer studies. Queer Studies is a wide-ranging anthology which discusses the nature and diversity of queer studies, its foundations, and some of the most pressing issues in the field today. Some contributors assess the conflict between postmodernism and theories of identity politics. Others address queer theory, looking specifically at how we define it, how we might use it to inform political activism, and how we can theorize such aspects of sexual performance/behaviors as s/m or butch/femme relationships. Other theories are also introduced and critiqued as contributors explain the value of feminist, cultural, and postmodern positions for queer theory.
Belsey, C. and J. Moore, Eds. (1997). Building Bodies. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press.
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.
Birke, L. (1999). Feminism and the Biological Body. Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press.
What is a body? What are our perceptions of our inner body? Lynda Birke raises these questions and many others in the first book in this new series. While bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture. They are assumed to be fixed, their workings uninteresting or irrelevant to theory. Birke argues that these static views of biology do not serve feminist politics well. As a trained biologist, she uses ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. She rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of "how nature works". Feminism and the Biological Body puts biological science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a politics which includes, rather than denies, our bodily flesh.
Bland, L. and L. Doan, Eds. (1998). Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of sexual Science. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Sexology Uncensored brings together, for the first time, many of the key documents of the modern science of sexuality that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The early pioneers of the new field of sexology examined and classified sexual behaviors, identities and relations. For years much of the material here has been "censored" - difficult to obtain, subject to restrictive circulation, or available only in medical archives. This volume offers readers access to the primary materials through which contemporary sexology is founded and, as such, it is an invaluable record for all those interested in how we have come to think about sex and sexuality over the last one hundred years. The extracts in Sexology (which date from the 1880s to the 1940s) are organized thematically: gender and sexual difference, homosexualities, transexuality and bisexuality, heterosexuality, marriage and sex manuals, reproductive control, eugenics, race, and other sexual proclivities.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.
Unbearable Weight, marked a milestone in the development of cultural criticism and gave to many within the academy and outside a substantive understanding of our culture. Truly interdisciplinary in its conceptualization and approach, it offers a whole new way of thinking and writing and living an intellectual life. It helped generate a whole new genre in literary and cultural studies that now goes under the name of "body studies". It is cited as a foundational work in sociology, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, psychology, and many others. Unbearable Weight is included on the "must read" list of websites dedicated to the interests of women, lesbians and gays, ethnicity, feminism, and pop culture. Unbearable Weight also became a kind of bible for a young generation of scholars.
Bordo, S. (1999). The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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.
Bordo, S. (1999). Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.
That we live in an image saturated culture has come to seem routine to us. But our great-grandparents would probably have had their brain circuits blown if they were plunked down in our culture. Massive and dramatic cultural and technological changes have taken place in an extraordinarily brief period of historical time- and so recently that we have barely begun to chart their effects on our perception, cognition, and most basic experiences of the relation between reality and appearance. The images are much more ubiquitous in our lives today than they were just a decade ago. The technology for producing them is far more sophisticated, and those who produce the images seem to have no compunction about using that technology in the service of a deceptive verisimilitude. With created images setting the standard, we are becoming habituated to the glossy and gleaming, the smooth and shining, the ageless and sagless and wrinkleless. We are learning to expect "perfection" and to find any "defect" repellent or unacceptable. We expect live performances to sound like CDs, politicians to say nothing messy or disturbing, real breasts to be as round and firm as implants.
Bordo, S. (2003 ). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.
Unbearable Weight, marked a milestone in the development of cultural criticism and gave to many within the academy and outside a substantive understanding of our culture. Truly interdisciplinary in its conceptualization and approach, it offers a whole new way of thinking and writing and living an intellectual life. It helped generate a whole new genre in literary and cultural studies that now goes under the name of "body studies". It is cited as a foundational work in sociology, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, psychology, and many others. Unbearable Weight is included on the "must read" list of websites dedicated to the interests of women, lesbians and gays, ethnicity, feminism, and pop culture. Unbearable Weight also became a kind of bible for a young generation of scholars.
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference
in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York, Columbia University Press.
Nomadic Subjects argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that that is conventionally adopted in high theory. Rosi Braidotti's personal, surprising, and lively prose insists on an integration of feminism into the mainstream discourse. The essays explore problems that are central to current feminist debates including Western epistemology's relation to the "woman question", feminism and biomedical ethics, European feminism, and how American feminists might relate to European movements.
Brand, P. Z., Ed. (2000). Beauty Matters. Bloomington and Indianapolis,
Indiana University Press.
Beauty Matters brings together a compilation of academic, accessible texts that examine how gender, race and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and we are driven to pursue it. The articles are largely based on the worlds of fashion, film and art. Contemporary views judge beauty by moral attitudes and scientific knowledge. Beauty Matters contrasts this with the theories of the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the beauty is solely based on one`s direct, personal response. Whatever the case, defining beauty remains a daunting challenge, one now overshadowed by issues of political correctness. Of particular interest for gay male readers is Susan Bordo's article on the modern use of male imagery. Originally titled 'Gay Men`s Revenge', here renamed 'Beauty (Re)Discovers the Male Body', Bordo pontificates on Calvin Klein adverts and the objectification of male models. She sees Klein`s use of men in his adverts as a culmination of an aesthetic style pursued throughout the twentieth century by several photographers, such as George Platt Lynes and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Briggs, L. (2002). Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S.
Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Los Angeles and London, University of
California Press.
Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it reveals the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization.
Brook, B. (1999). Feminist Perspectives on the Body. London and
New York, Longman.
Feminist Perspectives on the Body provides an accessible introduction to this very popular subject area and is aimed at students from a variety of disciplines interested in gaining an understanding of the key issues involved. The author explores many important topics including: the Western world's construction of the body as a theoretical, philosophical and political concept, the body and reproduction, medicalisation, cosmetic surgery and eating disorders, the body in performance, the private and the public body, working bodies and new ways of thinking about the body.
Brown, C. and K. Jasper, Eds. (1993). Consuming Passions: Feminist approaches to Weight Preoccupation and Eating Disorders. Toronto and Ontario, Second Story Press.
Twenty-two experts share their extensive knowledge on women's preoccupation with body size. They consider the continuum of eating behaviours ranging from dieting and exercise for weight control to anorexia and bulimia, and explore recent research in such areas as the failure of dieting to control weight, and the increasingly disputed links traditionally made between weight and health.
Brown, P. (1988). The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York, Columbia University Press.
In his book Peter Brown addresses the practice of permanent sexual renunciation--continence, celibacy, and life-long virginity--that developed in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. Brown vividly describes the early Christians and their strange, disturbing preoccupations. He follows in detail the reflection and controversy these notions generated among Christian writers. Among the topics covered are marriage and sexuality in the Roman world, Judaism and the early church, Origen and the tradition of spiritual guidance, sexuality in the desert fathers and Augustine and sexuality. The Body and Society is a significant study on sexuality and the family in the ancient world by a renowned scholar. Besides being of great interest to readers in ancient history and early church history, and to classicists and medievalists, it will engage readers concerned with women's studies and the history of sexuality.
Brown, W. (1988). Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory. New Jersey, Rowman and Littlefield Publisher.
Until recently, the realm of politics has been limited almost exclusively to men. Wendy Brown, with her unerring aim for the essential, exposes the historical link between men's politics and the character and content of political thought and practice in a genderdivided world. This feminist analysis of Western political thought goes straight to the heart of the matter--bypassing the "woman issue"--to lay bare, with irresistible logic, the development of the ideal of man and manhood and its influence on the ontological basis of Western political thought. An interpretation of the works of three giants of classical political theory constitutes the main body of this work: Aristotle, who proclaimed man a political animal and the world of the polis his natural habitat; Machiavelli, who associated political excellence with virt?--the exertion needed to channel action, cunning, and strength to achieve one's goals; and Max Weber, who called for a politician endowed with heroic stature to save politics from the desultory process of bureaucratic rationalization. Manhood and Politics is an original, often acerbic reading of familiar themes in classical works. Professor Brown artfully weaves the dissimilarities of fundamentally masculine political theories into a depiction of points of similarity in constructing ideals of manhood and, in the process, provides touchstones for an alternative, "postmasculinist" politics.
Caplan, J., Ed. (2000). Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European
and American History. London, Reaktion Books.
Written on the Body surveys the history of the tattoo in Europe and North America from Antiquity to the present day. While the subject of tattooing has been approached from the viewpoints of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, this is the first book to set the practice into a historical perspective. This is partly because there was no obvious context for writing a serious history of the tattoo prior to the recent emergence of scholarship on the cultural history of the body, and partly because of the ephemeral nature of the practice. Even given the current vogue for tattooing, most treatments of the subject have been superficial, relying on visual rather than textual analysis. This groundbreaking book demonstrates for the first time that there is in fact a rich and fascinating, if episodic, history to be discovered. The tattoo emerges as a haunting presence on Europe's margins, figuring repeatedly as something alien and uncanny, something that is not - or should not be - at home in Western culture. The Western tattoo seems to hover for much of its history in a space between the cosmetic and the punitive, frequently indicative of and complicated by the practice of penal violations of bodily integrity. It is this fluidity of the tattoo's meaning, rather than its marginality, that is the focus of Written on the Body.
Cockburn, C. (1991). In the Way of Women: Men's Resistance to Sex
Equality in Organizations. Hampshire and London, Palgrave-Macmillan.
Women have carried the feminist movement into the heartlands of male power: into the state, trade unions, local councils, business corporations. A flurry of "equal opportunity" activities were the result. But women found the effort costly and the gains meager. What was blocking change? The research upon which this book is based evaluates aspects of how men prove themselves sometimes helpful, but more often resistant to feminist changes in four large organizations, and reveals the struggle over the equality agenda: is change to be about sharing power or changing power? It shows how women as a sex, but also black people, lesbians and gays, and people with disabilities, are compelled to hide their "difference" if they wish to claim a right to "equality". From these painful experiences of equality activism the author draws lessons for feminist alliances that might end the male monoculture of power and make organizations more democratic and responsible.
Connor, J. S. O., A. S. Orloff, et al., Eds. (1999). States, Markets,
Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada,
Great Britain and the United States. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
Three leading figures in the field make up this important contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in an era of economic restructuring and market liberalism. Structured as thematically and systematically comparative, the book analyzes three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. It explores the question of whether liberal states should intervene in workplaces or families to guarantee the rights and welfare of all individuals within them. The experiences of Canada, the UK, United States and Australia are the focus of the book.
Cooper, C. (1998). Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. London, The Women's Press.
In Fat and Proud, activist Charlotte Cooper reclaims the word "fat" as she charts the evolution of the fat rights movement. Demonstrating the extent of "fatphobia" in society, she explains not only how it affects fat women, but how the fear of being fat oppresses all women. Fat and Proud also looks at health issues, challenging the "medicalization" of fat people and exposing the myths and dangers of dieting and thinness. Throughout are the voices of fat women relating their experiences of discrimination and pain--but also their affirmations of positive self-image and esteem. Fat and Proud represents a coming to power of the fat rights movement; it calls for a greater appreciation of body-size diversity, so that all of us might live in and enjoy our bodies without fear or shame.
Davis, K., Ed. (1997). Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives
on the Body. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications.
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".
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and
the Construction of Sexuality. New York, Basic Books.
Anne Fausto-Sterling goes on to critique the science itself, exposing inconsistencies in the literature and weaknesses in the rhetorical and theoretical structures that support new research. "One of the major claims I make in this book," she explains, "is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender--not science--can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." Whether discussing genital surgery on intersex infants or the amorous lives of lab rats, the author is unfailingly clear and convincing, and manages to impart humor to subjects as seemingly unpromising as neuroanatomy and the structure of proteins.
Featherstone, M., Ed. (2005). Body Modification. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications.
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.
Fraser, M. (1999). Identity without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir
and Bisexuality. Cambridge, Cambridge Universtity Press.
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.
Frost, L. (2001). Young Women and the Body: A Feminist Sociology. New York, Palgrave.
Why are young women today deeply unhappy with their own bodies? Why do young girls inflict serious harm on themselves by dangerous patterns of binge eating and dieting? Drawing on a wide range of sources of feminist perspectives, this book examines this epidemic of body-hatred in adolescent girls and young women.
Fuss, D. (1995). Identification Papers. New York and London, Routledge.
The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. Identification Papers is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics. Identification Papers situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identification in Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one. Identification Papers closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political. Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- Identification Papers will be a necessary starting point in any future theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.
Garcia-Ramon, M. D. and J. Monk, Eds. (1996). Women of the European Union: The Politics of Work and Daily Life. International Studies of Women and Place. London and New York, Routledge
Women of the European Union challenges gender-blind assessments of the economic and social aspects of EU policies to examine the real implications of union for the diversity of women in the member states. The authors also analyse how women's work and daily lives are shaped by local and national policies, by local and global economic conditions, and by diverse and changing cultural values. Detailed contemporary case studies explore how place comes together with class, life stage, sexuality and ethnicity to affect the ways in which women are constrained, and how they develop strategies to manage their lives.
Giddens, A. (1992). The Transformation if Intimacy: Sexuality, Love
and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge, Polity Press.
The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does "sexuality" come into being, and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life more generally? In answering these questions, the author disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture.The author suggests that the revolutionary changes in which sexuality has become caught up in are more long-term than generally conceded. He sees them as intrinsic to the development of modern societies as a whole and to the broad characteristics of that development. Sexuality as we know it today is a creation of modernity, a terrain upon which the contradictory tendencies of modern social life play themselves out in full. Emancipation and oppression, opportunity and risk - these have become a part of a heady mix that irresistably ties our individual lives to global outcomes and the transformation of intimacy. We live today in a social order in which, for the first time in history, women are becoming equal to men - or at least have lodged a claim to such equality as their right. The author does not attempt to analyze the gender inequalities that persist in the economic or political domains, but instead concentrates on a more hidden personal area in which women-ordinary women, in the course of their day-to-day lives, quite apart from any political agenda - have pioneered changes of importance. These changes essentially concern an exploration of the potentialities of the "pure relationship", a relaitonship that presumes sexual and emotional equality, and is explosive in its connotations for pre-existing relations of power. The author analyzes the emergence of what he calls plastic sexuality - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - in terms of the emotional emancipation implicit in the pure relationship, as well as women's claim to sexual pleasure. Plastic sexuality is decentered sexuality, freed from both reproduction and subservience to a fixed object. It can be molded as a trait of personality, and thus become bound up with the reflexivity of the self. Premised on plastic sexuality, the pure relationship is not exclusively heterosexual; it is neutral in terms of sexual orientation.The author speculates that the transformaion of intimacy might be a subversive influence on modern institutions as a whole, for a social world in which the dominant ideal was to achieve intinsic rewards from the company of others might be vastly different from that which we know at the present.
Giles, W. and J. Hyndman, Eds. (2004). Sites of Violence: Gender
and Conflict Zones. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of
California Press.
In conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to Guatemala and Somalia, the rules of war are changing dramatically. Distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and domestic security are breaking down. In this especially timely book, a powerful group of international authors doing feminist research brings the highly gendered and racialized dimensions of these changes into sharp relief. In essays on nationalism, the political economy of conflict, and the politics of asylum, they investigate what happens when the body, household, nation, state, and economy become sites at which violence is invoked against people. In particular, these essays move us forward in our understanding of violence against women--how it is perpetrated, survived, and resisted. They explore the gendered politics of ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka, the post-Yugoslav states, and Israel and Palestine. They consider "honor killings" in Iraqi Kurdistan, armed conflict in the Sudan, and geographies of violence in Ghana. This volume augments feminist analysis on conflict zones and contributes to transnational coalition-building and feminist organizing efforts.
Gilman, S. L. (2001). Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton and Oxford, Oxford University Press.
An intriguing inquiry into how aesthetic surgery has evolved into a major area of modern medicine, this book combines cultural perspectives on the body beautiful with a medical chronology. Gilman focuses extensively on the nose as the original site of aesthetic procedures. He simultaneously explores "the basic motivation for aesthetic surgery as the desire to 'pass,'" starting with 16th-century surgery to rebuild the noses of syphilitics "so they would be less visible in their society" and discusses its cultural implications. Early debate centered on whether surgery restored function or merely catered to human vanity. The "hierarchy of races" created by some scientists in the 18th century inspired procedures to create "American noses out of Irish pug noses," while "the origin of the 'correction' of the black nose is masked within medical literature [because] no reputable surgeon wanted to be seen as facilitating crossing the color bar." Gilman discusses political uses of aesthetic surgery, such as that of the Nazis to achieve the Aryan ideal, the transformation of former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke into what one commentator called "a blond, blow-dried replica of a young Robert Redford," transsexual surgery to permit "restoration of the relationship between the inner and outer selves" and aesthetic surgery as a fountain of youth.
Grayzel, S. R. (1999). Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood,
and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Chapel
Hill and London, The University of North Carolina Press.
There are few moments in history when the division between the sexes seems as "natural" as during wartime: men go off to the "war front," while women stay behind on the "home front." But the very notion of the home front was an invention of the First World War, when, for the first time, "home" and "domestic" became adjectives that modified the military term "front." Such an innovation acknowledged the significant and presumably new contributions of civilians, especially women, to the war effort. Yet, as Susan Grayzel argues, throughout the war, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity survived, primarily through the maintenance of--and indeed reemphasis on--soldiering and mothering as the core of gender and national identities. Drawing on sources that range from popular fiction and war memorials to newspapers and legislative debates, Grayzel analyzes the effects of World War I on ideas about civic participation, national service, morality, sexuality, and identity in wartime Britain and France. Despite the appearance of enormous challenges to gender roles due to the upheavals of war, the forces of stability prevailed, she says, demonstrating the Western European gender system's remarkable resilience.
Greer, G. (2000). The Whole Woman. London, Anchor.
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.
Griggs, C. (2003). S / He: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes. Oxford,
New York, Berg.
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.
Grogan, S. (1999). Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction
in Men, Women and Children. London and New York, Routledge.
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.
Groot, G. J. D. and C. Peniston-Bird (2000). A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military. Harlow, London, New York, Longman.
The image of an armed woman is one rife with tension - it challenges our deep-rooted beliefs regarding the proper role of women in society. The connection between military service and citizenship is explicit to varying degrees in most societies - and therefore the right of women to bear arms is an issue that strikes at the heart of a society's valuation of women. A Soldier and a Woman explores this controversial subject in nineteen chapters spanning three centuries and four continents from the late medieval period to the present day. A Soldier and a Woman builds a picture of the practical and ideological issues surrounding women soldiers, and the ambiguous place they inhabit. In the process uncovering a remarkable continuity across cultures and periods. The female soldier raises questions of military readiness, gender identity, perceptions of the body, power structures and hierarchy, gendered symbolism and language, personal and collective identities, the power of myths, and the disjunction between equality and conformity.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivitiy, psychological depth and interiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of the body (Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Schilder, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lingis and Deleuze) who, while freeing the body from its subordination to the mind, are nonetheless unable to accomodate the specificities of women's bodies. Volatile Bodies explores various dissonances in thinking the relation between mind and body. It investigates issues that resist reduction to these binary terms - psychosis, hypochondria, neurological disturbances, perversions and sexual deviation - and most particularly the enigmatic status of body fluids, and the female body.
Grosz, E. and E. Probyn, Eds. (1996). Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. London and New York, Routledge.
Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are: dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities. Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body from vampires to tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard. Sexy Bodies makes new connections between and amongst bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable and the hitherto unspoken rethinking sexuality anew as deeply and strangely sexy.
Halberstam, J. (2003). Female Masculinity. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Halberstam presents a unique offering in queer studies: a study of the masculine lesbian woman. Halberstam makes a compelling argument for a more flexible taxonomy of masculinity, including not only men, who have historically held the power in society, but also women who embody qualities that are usually associated with maleness, such as strength, authority, and independence. Fleshing out her argument by drawing on a variety of sources, fiction, films, court documents, and diaries, Halberstam calls for society to acknowledge masculine lesbian women and value them.
Halkias, A. (2004). The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion,
and Nationalism in Modern Greece. Durham and London, Duke University
Press.
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.
Hall, D. E. and M. Pramaggiore, Eds. (1996). Re Presenting Bi Sexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desires. New York and London, New York University Press.
Is bisexuality coming out in America? Bisexual characters are surfacing on popular television shows and in film. Newsweek proclaims that a new sexual identity is emerging. But amidst this burgeoning acknowledgment of bisexuality, is there an understanding of what it means to be bisexual in a monosexual culture? RePresenting Bisexualities seeks to answer these questions, integrating a recognition of bisexual desire with new theories of gender and sexuality. Despite the breakthroughs in gender studies and queer studies of recent years, bisexuality has remained largely unexamined. Problematic sexual images are usually attributed either to homosexual or heterosexual desire while bisexual readings remain unexplored. The essays found in RePresenting Bisexualities discuss fluid sexualities through a variety of readings from the fence, covering texts from Emily Dickinson to Nine Inch Nails. Each author contributes to the collection a unique view of sexual fluidity and transgressive desire. Taken together, these essays provide the most comprehensive bisexual theory reader to date.
Hanna, J. L. (1988). Dance, Sex and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.
Judith Hanna's book offers an understanding of how dance, sex roles, sexuality, and culture intertwine. Hannah covers historic and contemporary dance forms from around the world, initiating a discussion that should propel a more methodologically informed study of dance and gender.
Hemmings, C. (2002). Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and
Gender. New York and London, Routledge.
As a largely unexplored area, this inquiry is an innovative and original examination of bisexual spaces as places that are defined by both geographical boundaries and cultural assumptions. Hemmings applies the ideas of queer theory as well as social and cultural geography in her fascinating investigation into the spaces and places of bisexual life. Specifically focusing on Northhampton, MA and San Francisco, she draws on interviews with community members and the town histories showing how and why they have developed into safe places for the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities. By mapping out a space of bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces provides a new and provocative understanding of the concept.
Hennessy, R. (2000). Profit and Pleasure; Sexual Identity in Late Capitalism. New York and London, Routledge.
The basic premise of this book is that "the structural contradictions on which capitalism is based . . . shape the work we do, the food we eat, our mobility in the world, how we know, who and how we love." Further, Hennessy argues that homosexuality can no longer be seen as a "monolithic or universal identity" and that "all sexual identities . . . are intimately inflected by gender, race, nationality, ability, age." Hennessy makes the point that these "identities themselves arise from capitalism." and gives us a Marxist feminist analysis of the commodification of culture in global capitalism and the creation and management of sexual identities. Her historical approach uncovers problems not only with classical identity politics but also with postmodern queer theory and politics with incisive criticisms of Althusser, Williams, Butler and De Lauretis.
Heywood, L. (1998). Body Makers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building. New Brunswick-New Jersey-London, Rutgers University Press.
Women with muscles are a recent phenomenon, so recent that, while generating a good deal of interest, both positive and negative, their importance to the cultural landscape has yet to be acknowledged. This newness, along with the ways in which muscular women challenge traditional ideas that associate women with physical weakness and incompetence, femininity with diminution and childishness, and the female body with softness, has led to a widely held belief, both inside of body building circles and outside, that the cultural implications of female body building are limited to a small subculture. Leslie Heywood looks at the sport and image of female body building as a metaphor for how women fare in our current political and cultural climate. Drawing on contemporary feminist and cultural theory as well as her own involvement in the sport, she argues that the movement in women's body building from small, delicate bodies to large powerful ones and back again is directly connected to progress and backlash within the abortion debate, the ongoing struggle for race and gender equality, and the struggle to define "feminism" in the context of the nineties. She discusses female body building as activism, as an often effective response to abuse, race and masculinity in body building, and the contradictory ways that photographers treat female body builders. Engaging and accessible, Bodymakers reveals how female bodybuilders find themselves both trapped and empowered by their sport.
Holmstrom, N., Ed. (2002). The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary
Reader in Theory and Politics. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Socialist feminist theorizing is flourishing today. This collection is intended to show its strengths and resources and convey a sense of it as an ongoing project. Not every contribution to that project bears the same theoretical label, but the writings collected here share a broad aim of understanding women's subordination in a way which integrates class and gender - as well as aspects of women's identity such as race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation - with the aim of liberating women. The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics brings together the most important recent socialist feminist writings on a wide range of topics: sex and reproduction, the family, wage labor, social welfare and public policy, the place of sex and gender in politics, and the philosophical foundations of socialist feminism. Although focusing on recent writings, the collection shows how these build on a history of struggle. These writings demonstrate the range, depth, and vitality of contemporary socialist feminist debates. They also testify to the distinctive capacity of this project to address issues in a way that embraces collective experience and action while at the same time enabling each person to speak in their own personal voice.
Hopkins, P. D., Ed. (1998). Sex / Machine: Readings in Culture,
Gender, and Technology. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University
Press.
Sex/Machine is maping the intersection between gender and technology. Crossing multiple academic disciplines--from philosophy of technology, to medical ethics, to womens studies, gender theory and cultural studies, to law (among others), Patrick Hopkins has assembled a collection of provocative writing concerning the interactions between technologies and genders. The essays in this edited volume explore the history of technologies and gender, and how technology can shore up traditional and problematic gender roles (e.g., pectoral implants to make men appear more "macho", and technologies that make it possible for parents to know, and potentially select, the sex of their children before they are born). Another important aspect of the book is the exploration of the ways technologies undermine traditional ideas of gender.
Intervention, B. A., Ed. (1997). The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation,
Identity and Desire. London and Washington, Cassell.
What does it mean to desire both men and women?This question has been answered in many different ways and asked for many different reasons: by Madonna, by Freud, by feminism, by Shakespeare, and more recently by the emergent bisexual community. The essays in The Bisexual Imaginary demonstrate that the ways in which bisexuality is discussed shed important light on how we make sense of our desires and how we produce identities and communities out of them. Covering variously film and sexology, photography and literature, psychoanalysis and political identity, this collection explores the different ways that bisexuality has both been represented and had its representation elided. By refusing to argue simply for a new and autonomous "bisexual self", these essays show desiring both men and women plays a complex role in the construction of lesbian, gay, and straight identities. Bisexuality is presented as simultaneously pivotal to a sense of self and as that which causes profound anxiety and tension within the self.The Bisexual Imaginary, offers wide-ranging analysis of these concerns and makes a timely case for the centrality of bisexual theory to gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, and cultural and literary studies.
Jackson, S. and S. Scott, Eds. (2002). Feminism and Sexuality: A
Reader. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
This reader brings together a range of feminist writing on sexuality. Emphasizing the diversity of feminist perspectives, the readings are grouped together under four main areas within the debates about sexuality: essentialism versus social construction; affirming and questioning sexual categories; power and pleasure; and commercial sex.
Jackson, S. and S. Scott, Eds. (2002). Gender: A Sociological Reader. London and New York, Routledge.
This reader offers students an informed overview of some of the most significant sociological work on gender produced over the last three decades. The readings cover both theoretical and empirical work representing a range of perspectives and each section includes selections which address the intersection of gender with differences of 'race', class and sexuality. The text is informed by an understanding of gender as a structural social division and a set of everyday social practices.
Kimmel, M. S. (2004). The Gendered Society. New York and Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Thoroughly updated and revised, the second edition of The Gendered Society explores current thinking about gender, both inside academia and in our everyday lives. Part I examines the latest work in biology, anthropology, psychology, and sociology; Part II provides an original analysis of the gendered worlds of family, education, and work; and Part III focuses on the gendered interactions of friendship and love, sexuality, and violence. As a result of his research, author Michael S. Kimmel makes three claims about gender. First, he argues that the differences between men and women are not as great as we often imagine, and that in fact women and men have far more in common with one another than we think they do. Second, he challenges the notions of the many pop psychologists who suggest that gender difference is the cause of the dramatic observable inequality between the sexes. Instead, Kimmel reveals that the reverse is true: gender inequality is the cause of the differences between women and men. Third, he argues that gender is not simply an aspect of individual identity but is also an institutional phenomenon, embedded in the organizations and institutions in which we interact daily. Kimmel concludes with a brief epilogue looking ahead to gender relations in the new century.
Laqueur, T. (2003[1990]). Making Sex: Body and Gender from Greeks
to Freud. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.
This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe. Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "masterplots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.
Lewis, G., S. Gewirtz, et al., Eds. (2000). Rethinking Social Policy.
London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, The Open University in association
with Sage Publications.
Rethinking Social Policy is a comprehensive introduction to, and analysis of, the complex mixture of problems and possibilities within the study of social policy. Contributors at the cutting edge of social policy analysis reflect upon the implications of new social and theoretical movements for welfare and the study of social policy. Topics covered include: criminology and crime control; race, class and gender; poverty and sexuality; the body and the emotions; violence; work and welfare in Europe. Examples are drawn from a variety of welfare sectors such as: social services and community care, health, education, employment, and criminal justice. This is a course reader for The Open University course (D860) "Rethinking Social Practice."
Lowe, M. R. (1998). Women of Steel: Female Body Builders and the
Struggle for Self-Definition. New York and London, New York University
Press.
"A lot of people in the general public think female bodybuilding is gross and freaky . . . that that's not what a woman is supposed to look like." So says Michelle, a national bodybuilding judge. In fact, athletic women, especially those in sports where strength, muscle, and sweat feature prominently, are typically viewed by the public as being outside the boundaries of appropriate femininity. And perhaps no group of women athletes embodies this gender outlaw status more than female bodybuilders, who by their bulk and sheer strength challenge our very notions of what it means to be a woman. Why would women choose to look like that? And what does it take to become and stay so muscular? Maria R. Lowe has interviewed more than one hundred people connected with women's bodybuilding, from the bodybuilders themselves, to trainers, family members, spouses, judges, and sponsors. In Women of Steel, Lowe introduces us to a world where size and strength must be balanced with a nod toward grace and femininity. Lowe, who actually worked out with a couple of the bodybuilders she interviewed, gets at the heart of what it is to be a woman bodybuilder. We learn about "paying the price"--doing the necessary exercise, and sometimes drugs--that allows women to rise to the top of their profession. We follow their successes and failures, and discover the benefits-- including increased self-esteem and physical strength--as well as the sometimes unhealthy effects of their training regimen, from dehydration to baldness to rampant acne to high blood pressure. We travel with the women from competition to competition and find that judges' standards seem to vary alarmingly depending on momentary notions of what constitutes "the overall package"--that elusive perfect body that catches the judge's eye and wins competitions.
Lupton, D. (1994). Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media. London and Bristol, Taylor & Francis.
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.
Lykke, N. and R. Braidotti, Eds. (1996). Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London and New York, Zed Books.
What is a specifically feminist perspective on science and technology? Focusing in particular on the socio-cultural implications of the latest scientific and technological developments, this book proposes a site of resistance to hegemonic discourses and practices of science and technology. Four sections cover science as a whole, the new technologies of the postmodern era, bio-medical discourses and nature. A distinguished cast of contributors explore the central feminist concerns in each arena, through the metaphors of monster, mother goddess and cyborg. They argue that feminists cannot ignore the emancipatory as well as the oppressive potentials of technology. Bringing together 'natural' and 'social' scientists, the book paves the way for a specifically feminist strategy for science, technology and health care.
MacKinnon, K. (2003 [1989]). Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.
This is a theoretical legal treatise from activist attorney MacKinnon, co-author of the controversial Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-pornography civil rights ordinance. She begins with a discussion of feminism and Marxism, because (as she explains) the latter is the only contemporary political tradition to confront organized social dominance as a dynamic. She goes on to analyze feminist methodologies (in terms of consciousness-raising) and the knowledge it reveals; and what she calls feminism unmodified (radical feminism) as a post-Marxist methodology. She explores issues of sexuality/gender and how they contribute to women's oppression and the role of the liberal state in promoting it. Revealing, closely reasoned, densely written, this is not easy reading, but sure to be hotly debated among academicians and intellectuals.
Mazour, A. G. (2002). Theorizing Feminist Policy. London, New York,
Oxford University Press.
Theorizing Feminist Policy avoids the usual clash between feminist analysis and non-feminist social science in mapping out the new field of feminist comparative policy. Instead, it intersects empirical feminist policy analysis with non-feminist policy studies to define and contribute to this new and emerging field of study. Consulting a wide sweep of empirical and theoretical work, the book first defines Feminist Comparative Policy showing how it dialogs with the adjacent non-feminist areas of Comparative Public Policy, Comparative Politics, and Public Policy Studies. It then seeks to strengthen one of the weakest links of this new area - the study of explicitly feminist government action. In the remaining chapters, the books defines feminist policy as a separate sector, with eight sub-sectors. It develops a qualitative and comparative framework for analysing the profiles and styles of feminist policy in post industrial democracies and uses the framework to examine twenty seven different cases of feminist policy formation across thirteen different countries.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York, London, Routledge.
McClintock interprets 19th-century British imperialism as the focal point for that era's major "disclosures," including feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. She describes Victorian urban space, including advertising, as being oriented to exhibit imperial spectacles based on racism and sexism. In turn, the colonies become stages for exhibiting a reinvented patriarchy, with Westerners symbolizing power and indigenous peoples a subdued domesticity. The text is an exercise in demonstrating preconceptions. While some of McClintock's evidence is original, the argument as a whole is conventional bien-pensant wisdom unlikely to convince anyone not already committed to the thesis. The presentation is further burdened by its reliance on the cliches and jargon of feminism, deconstructionism, and other currently fashionable academic ideologies. Imperialism was at once a simpler and a more complex phenomenon than McClintock's perspective allows. For large academic collections only.
McNay, L. (2000). Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in
Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge, Polity Press.
This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies. McNay argues that recent thought on the formation of the modern subject offers a one-sided or negative account of agency, which underplays the creative dimension present in the responses of individuals to changing social relations. An understanding of this creative element is central to a theory of autonomous agency, and also to an explanation of the ways in which women and men negotiate changes within gender relations.In exploring the implications of this idea of agency for a theory of gender identity, McNay brings together the work of leading feminist theorists - such as Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser - with the work of key continental social theorists. In particular, she examines the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, each of whom has explored different aspects of the idea of the creativity of action. McNay argues that their thought has interesting implications for feminist ideas of gender, but these have been relatively neglected partly because of the huge influence of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in this area. She argues that, despite its suggestive nature, feminist theory must move away from the ideas of Foucault and Lacan if a more substantive account of agency is to be introduced into ideas of gender identity. This book will appeal to students and scholars in the areas of social theory, gender studies and feminist theory.
Mitchell, J. (2000). Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. New
York, Basic Books.
This worthy successor to Juliet Mitchell's pathbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism is both a defense of the long-dismissed diagnosis of hysteria as a centerpiece of the human condition and a plea for a new understanding of the influence of sibling and peer relationships. In Mad Men and Medusas Mitchell traces the history of hysteria, arguing that we need to reclaim hysteria to understand how distress and trauma express themselves in different societies and different times. Mitchell convincingly demonstrates that although hysteria may have disappeared as a disease, it is still a critical factor in understanding psychological development through the life cycle.
Mitchell, J. (2000[1974]). Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York, Basic Books.
In 1974, at the height of the women's movement, Juliet Mitchell shocked her fellow feminists by challenging the entrenched belief that Freud was the enemy. She argued that a rejection of psychoanalysis as bourgeois and patriarchal was fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, she pointed out, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but rather an analysis of one. "If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women," she says, "we cannot afford to neglect psychoanalysis." In an introduction written specially for this reissue, Mitchell reflects on the changing relationship between these two major influences on twentieth-century thought. Original and provocative, Psychoanalysis and Feminism remains an essential component of the feminist canon.
Mitchell, J. (2003). Siblings. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which we might understand them. In the Western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or ascent: mother or father to child, or child to parent. Yet our ideals are 'liberty, equality and fraternity' or the 'sisterhood' of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of 'fratricide'.When we grow up, siblings feature prominently in sex, violence and the construction of gender differences but they are absent from our theories. This book examines the reasons for this omission and begins the search for a new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships.This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to a wide general readership.
Moore, P. (1997). Building Bodies. New Jersey, Rutgers University
Press.
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.
Nichter, M. (2001). Fat Talk: What Girls and their Parents say about
Dieting. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.
"Psychologists, nutritionists, sociologists, and others in the medical field have offered many statistics about body image and self-esteem as they relate to teenage girls. In this summation of a three-year study, Nichter (Anthropology, Univ. of Arizona) lets 240 American teenage girls speak for themselves. The results, which make up the core of this work, cover weight, appearance, relationships with mothers, and race as variables in the girls' perception of body image and reveal that girls don't diet as much as they talk about dieting. In the third year of the project, 50 additional African American girls joined the study so that Nichter could further explore cultural differences, and of all the issues discussed, the differences in the answers about race were the most interesting. Nichter's writing style is pleasant, using the actual words of the subjects to supplement her theories and observations. Statistical data are supplied at the end. This is most appropriate for academic or libraries specializing in social sciences." From Library Journal.
Nye, R. A., Ed. (1999). Sexuality. London and New York, Oxford University
Press.
Offering a unique look at this controversial subject, Sexuality is the only reader of its kind that organizes material chronologically and covers such a long time period. Part I forms a chronological narrative of the development of thinking about sexuality from the ancient Greeks to the present. Part II discusses nineteenth-century investigation of phenomena such as hysteria, prostitution, and fetishism. Part III brings together contemporary conceptions of the sexual body, and Part IV addresses the issue of whether the sexual revolution of the late sixties and seventies has brought about a profound and permanent change in the sexual landscape of western civilization.
Pick, S. (1997). Πλάθοντας τη Ζωή Αθήνα, Φυτράκης.
Η σεξουαλική διαπαιδαγώγηση παιδιών και εφήβων απασχολούσε και απασχολεί εκατοντάδες εκατομμύρια σε όλο τον κόσμο. Το βιβλίο Πλάθοντας τη ζωή είναι η απάντηση στην ανάγκη για σωστή σεξουαλική διαπαιδαγώγηση και αποτελεί ένα πολύτιμο μάθημα, που προχωρά πολύ πιο πέρα από την απλή αύξηση των γνώσεων του εφήβου για τη σεξουαλικότητα του και τη χρήση αντισυλληπτικών μέσων. Το βιβλίο Πλάθοντας τη ζωή προσφέρει στον έφηβο στοιχεία που του επιτρέπουν να σκέφτεται σωστά και τον βοηθούν να παίρνει τις αποφάσεις του με τρόπο ενημερωμένο, ελεύθερο και συνειδητό. Συγχρόνως τον οδηγεί στη βελτίωση της σεξουαλικής του υγείας και τον διευκολύνει στην αναζήτηση της ταυτότητάς του και την ωρίμανση του σε σωματικό, συναισθηματικό, πνευματικό και κοινωνικό επίπεδο.
Plummer, K. (1995). Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social
Worlds. London and New York, Routledge.
This book has had a long gestation, and finally became something quite different from what was originally indented. Indeed, the book has been drafted in at least three different forms with varying problems over a number of years. It started in 1978 as an empirical study of sexual diversity sponsored by the then Social Science research Council in which the life histories of "paedophiles", "transvestites" and "sadomasochists" were to be analyzed sociologically. Some remnants of that study remain, but the main contribution of that research to this book was to suggest the problem of how and why people are willing to provide such interview material of their sexual life stories. A second version was informed much more by feminist debates during the 1980s and was concerned with the rise of new social movements around sexuality. Neither of these books saw the light of day, but they led to this one. Anyone who writes about sex these days stands at the intersection of a vast amount of literature speaking about sex from every conceivable persuasion. It is indeed one argument of this book that we have become the talking, babbling sex. Large computer-based bibliographies on every aspect of sex from every discipline and angle can now be found or created: but anyone would be hard put to actually read all the available material.
Rust, P. (1995). Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics:
Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution. New York and London, New York University
Press.
The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested. Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women. By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics.
Schiebinger, L., Ed. , Ed. (2000 ). Feminism and the Body Oxford
Readings in Feminism. New York, Oxford University Press, USA
This collection of classic essays in feminist body studies investigates the history of the image of the female body; from the medical 'discovery' of the clitoris, to the 'body politic' of Queen Elizabeth I, to women deprecated as 'Hottentot Venuses' in the nineteenth century. The text looks at the ways in which coverings bear cultural meaning: clothing reform during the French Revolution, Islamic veiling, and the invention of the top hat; as well as the embodiment of cherished cultural values in social icons such as the Statue of Liberty or the Barbie doll. By considering culture as it defines not only women but also men, this volume offers both the student and the general reader an insight into the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study involved in feminist body studies.
Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky Bodies and Boundaries. London and New
York, Routledge
Drawing on postmodernist analyses, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries presents a feminist investigation into the marginalization of women within western discourse that denies both female moral agency and bodylines. With reference to contemporary and historical issues in biomedicine, the book argues that the boundaries of both the subject and the body are no longer secure. The aim is both to valorize women and to suggest that "leakiness" may be the very ground for a postmodern feminist ethic. The contribution made by Margrit Shildrick is to go beyond modernist feminisms to radically displace the mechanisms by which women are devalued. The anxiety that postmodernism cannot yield an ethics, nor advance feminist concerns is addressed.
Shilling, C. (2003). The Body and Social Theory, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications.
"Essential to any collection of work on the body, health and illness, or social theory" --Choice
"Sophisticated... and acutely perceptive of the importance of the complex dialectic between social institutions, culture and biological conditions" - Times Higher Education Supplement
"Chris Shilling has done us all a splendid service in bringing together and illustrating the tremendous diversity and richness of sociological thinking on the topic of human embodiment and its implications" - Sociological Review
Sobal, J. a. M. D., Ed. (1999). Weighty Issues, Fatness and Thinness
as Social Problems. Hawthorne, NY, Aldine de Gruyter.
Many people consider their weight to be a personal problem, but when does body weight become a social problem? Until recently, the major public concern was whether enough food was consistently available. As food systems began to provide ample and stable amounts of food, questions about food availability were replaced with concerns about "ideal" weights and appearance. These interests were aggregated into public concerns about defining people as "too fat" and "too thin." The chapters in this volume offer several perspectives that can be used to understand the way society deals with fatness and thinness, considering historical foundations, medical models, gendered dimensions, institutional components, and collective perspectives. These different views illustrate the multifaceted nature of obesity and eating disorders, providing examples of how a variety of social groups construct weight as a social problem.
Stinson, K. M. (2001). Women and Dieting Culture: Inside a Commercial
Weight Loss Group New Brunswick, London, Rutgers University Press
American women invest millions of dollars in a quest for a body that meets our culture's standard of beauty-slenderness. Since we define a woman's sexual attractiveness as essential to her social worth, it is no wonder that "fat is a feminist issue." Commercial weight loss organizations have come under attack from feminist scholars for perpetuating the very social values that cause women to obsess about their weight. In Women and Dieting Culture, sociologist Kandi Stinson asks how these values are transmitted and how the women who join such organizations actually think about their bodies and weight. Stinson fully participated in a national, commercial weight-loss organization as a paying member. Her acute analysis and sensitive insider's account vividly illustrate the central role dieting and body image play in women's lives.
Stoler, L. A. and (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's Hisotry of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, Duke University Press
In Race and the Education of Desire, ann Laura Stoler offers a colonial reading of Foucault's History of Sexuality and challenges the marginalization of empire in his genealogy of the nineteenth-century bourgeois self. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 'College de France lectures on 'racisms of the state' as well as her own extensive colonial archival research, Stoler argues that a history of nineteenth-century European sexuality must also be a history of race. This book will change the way we think about Foucault and address how racial thinking in the past has shaped racial discourse today.
Storr, M. and Eds. (1999). Bisexuality: A Critical Reader. London and New York, Routledge.
Bisexuality: A Critical Reader brings together for the first time in one volume some of the most important and influential writings on bisexuality of the last 100 years. The pieces in this unique collection explore this slippery and often controversial concept from a range of perspectives, placing it in its historical and cultural contexts and interrogating its many meanings and uses. The reader is divided into four sections:
-Genealogy of the Concept of Bisexuality traces the ancestry of the concept and the ways in which its meanings have changed since the 1890s
-Bisexual Identities and Bisexual Behaviors samples some of the most important international research from the 1970s to the 1990s, discussing what it means to call oneself--or not to call oneself--"bisexual."
-Bisexual Epistemologies examines recent arguments that bisexuality is a revolutionary concept with a dangerous potential to subvert old ways of thinking about gender and sexuality
-Differences explores the inner dynamics of bisexuality and its possible futures in cyberspace.
Terry, J. (1999). An American Obsession: Science, Medicine and Homosexuality
in Modern Society Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
"In this persuasively argued social history, Terry, an associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University, contends that homosexuality "has acquired a symbolic centrality in American culture" as a dominant marker between the "normal" and the "abnormal" across a diverse range of disciplines and milieus. Drawing upon a wide range of materials from personal memoirs to legal cases, yellow journalism, pulp fiction, religious writings, psychology texts and "scientific" studies (which prove to be not all that scientific. Terry demonstrates how, over the past 100 years, theories about the causes, nature and possible "cure" for homosexuality have focused far more on notions of sexuality, sin, gender and "social good" than on homosexuality itself. Analyzing the work of such 19th-century sexologists as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, she illustrates how their naive, often contradictory theories became so influential that they still inform contemporary thought, including "gay gene" studies and the religious beliefs and rhetoric of the Christian right. While her broad survey is vital to the book, Terry's real strength is her detailed explorations of individual groups such as the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, a multidisciplinary group of physicians and scientists who, in 1935, attempted to understand the "problem" of homosexuality on a scientific basis and events, such as the harsh religious, psychoanalytic and cultural backlash against Kinsey's work in the early 1950s. Her exhaustively researched, astute synthesis is not only an original and important contribution to lesbian and gay studies, but sheds new light on the sociology of American life and the history of science." From Publishers Weekly. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
True, J. (2003). Gender, Globalization and Postsocialism New York,
Columbia University Press.
"This well researched study of the Czech Republic challenges conventional wisdom about the fate of women in post-socialist transitions in Eastern and Central Europe and shows how women, although they have lost ground in terms of formal political representation and employment opportunities, are finding ways to participate informally in building democracy from below. Linking her study to the broader international context, Jacqui True convincingly demonstrates how global forces shape and are shaped by gender relations in the family, the workplace, and in politics. True convinces us that we cannot understand the processes of globalization without paying attention to gender. This is not only an important contribution to a growing body of empirical feminist IR; it should also be of great interest to those concerned with post-socialist transitions as well as with the political, economic and cultural aspects of globalization." -- J. Ann Tickner, University of Southern California
Tseelon, E. (1995 ). The Masque of Feminity: The Presentation of
Women in Everyday Life (Theory, Culture and Society Series). London,
Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications
From Eve to Madonna, the normative conceptions of female identity have been largely associated with fashion and appearance. Now, in The Masque of Femininity, author Efrat Tseelon draws from interdisciplinary theory, empirical resources, and original research to examine how fashion, the body, and personal appearance have defined the female self. This volume explores femininity through an analysis of key concepts--modesty, duplicity, beauty, seduction, and death--and sheds light on such topics as the religious constructions of woman, the power of the prostitute metaphor, the female gaze, and cosmetic surgery. Elias, Freud, Lacan, Goffman, and Baudrillard are just a few of the scholars and theorists to whom the author makes reference in highlighting the paradoxical nature of the expectations that lie at the root of the contemporary feminine experience in the West. The Masque of Femininity will serve as an ideal supplement for courses in gender studies, cultural studies, and social psychology.
Watson, J. (2000). Male Bodies: Health, Culture and Identity.London
and Bristol, Taylor & Francis.
"This is an important and timely book which draws recent theorizing about the body into the frame of everyday experience in a manner that is directly relevant to the practical concerns of health promotion. Using accounts by men moving from youth to maturity, Jonathan Watson skillfully explores lay accounts about health and interprets them in terms of different concepts of embodiment."
Professor Gareth Williams, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.
o How do men perceive their bodies?
o How can empirical study of the body inform our understanding of the social world of men?
o What are the implications of such understanding for public health?
Wilton, T. (1997). Engendering Aids; Deconstructing Sex, Text, and
Epidemic. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications.
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.
Wittig, M. (1992). The Straight Mind. Boston, Beacon Press.
"Wittig ( The Lesbian Body ) is a key figure in French feminism, perhaps the foremost theorist of a profoundly radical lesbianism. Half of the nine essays in this brief collection deal directly with the politics of gender, a battlefield on which Wittig has staked out a nearly unique position: "There is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses." Drawing on de Beauvoir, Wittig strenuously resists both biological determinism and its twin, essentialism, arguing that sex itself is a social, ergo ideological, construct and that man and woman are not eternal categories. For women, she concludes, lesbianism is the logical escape from patriarchal domination. Wittig's prose is methodical and aggressive, combative and dense. The book's first half, containing the political essays, is a bit repetitive. The author is at her most elegant in the literary essays, which explicate the complex relationship between literary form and ideology. As a result, these ostensibly literary essays offer the most cogent statement of her political beliefs and, consequently, the most satisfying reading." From Publishers Weekly; Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Γκασούκα, Μ. (1998). Κοινωνιολογικές Προσεγγίσεις του Φύλου: Ζητήματα
Εξουσίας και Ιεραρχίας. Αθήνα, Δεν αναφέρεται.
"...Η γυναικεία σεξουαλικότητα αποτελεί βασικό στοιχείο ανταγωνισμού, κυρίως σε ό,τι αφορά το έλεγχο της και μάλιστα τον έλεγχο της αναπαραγωγής, μεταξύ ατόμων αλλά και ομάδων, δημιουργεί ιεραρχίες, αξιολογήσεις και είναι διαχρονικό υποκείμενο εξουσιαστικών σχέσεων. Το ερώτημα είναι συνεπώς εύλογο: Γιατί μια τέτοια ανταγωνιστική διαδικασία στο δημόσιο χώρο θεωρείται βαθύτατα πολιτική, ενώ στον ιδιωτικό χώρο ανάγεται στη σφαίρα της "φυσιολογίας"; Οι όροι εξουσία, καταναγκασμός, νομιμότητα, σε πείσμα των υποστηρικτών της "φυσικής τάξης πραγμάτων", τυγχάνουν ευρείας προσαρμογής στον ιδιωτικό χώρο και στο σύστημα ανθρώπινων σχέσεων αναπαραγωγής που στηρίζουν τελικά τη θεωρία και την πρακτική της πατριαρχίας..."
Δημητρίου, Σ., Ed. (2001). Ανθρωπολογία των Φύλων. Αθήνα, Σαββάλας.
Η ασυμμετρία, ή μάλλον η ανισότητα, μεταξύ των φύλων ήταν ένα από τα πρώτα ζητήματα που απασχόλησαν την ανθρωπολογία πριν από ενάμιση αιώνα, όταν αυτή άρχισε να διαμορφώνεται σε αυτόνομη επιστήμη. Οι όροι "μητριαρχία", "αρπαγή των γυναικών" κ.α. διατυπώθηκαν εκείνη την εποχή. Ακολούθησε ένα μακρύ διάστημα κατά το οποίο το ζήτημα παραγκωνίστηκε, εξαιτίας κυρίως των ιδεολογικών επιδράσεων που έστρεφαν το ενδιαφέρον είτε στους "πρωτόγονους", για της ανάγκες της αποικιοκρατίας, είτε στην κοινωνική ευταξία και ομοιογένεια, για την ενίσχυση του συντηρητισμού.Κατά την κρίση της 10ετίας του '70, που συνεχίζεται, μαζί με τα άλλα κοινωνικά κινήματα εκδηλώθηκε και το φεμινιστικό, οπότε το πρόβλημα των σχέσεων των φύλων βρέθηκε πάλι κα με νέες διαστάσεις στο προσκήνιο. Η ανθρωπολογία επανήλθε στην εξέταση του αλλά με νέα οπτική, αναθεωρώντας πολλές κατηγορίες της, ενισχύοντας νέους κλάδους, όπως είναι η ανθρωπολογία του σώματος, και συνδέοντάς το με άλλες διαστάσεις του κοινωνικού προβληματισμού, όπως είναι η διάσταση της δύναμης.Οι μελέτες που περιέχονται στο συλλογικό αυτό τόμο εξετάζουν από διάφορες πλευρές τις σχέσεις των φύλων. Ταυτόχρονα, παρουσιάζουν το νέο πρίσμα της ανθρωπολογικής προσέγγισης. Με το πρίσμα αυτό φωτίζεται η κοινωνική δυναμική και προβάλλονται η ετερογένεια και οι αντιθέσεις αντί της ομοιογένειας, η διαδικασία αντί της ουσίας, η κοινωνική κατασκευή των φύλων αντί του βιολογικού ντετερμινισμού, η εξάρτησή τους από την κοινωνική οργάνωση και ο ρόλος τους στην ανέλιξη των σχέσεων δύναμης. Από την άποψη αυτή, προσφέρει ένα θεωρητικό υπόβαθρο στην πολιτική του γυναικείου ζητήματος.
Μιχαηλίδου, Μ. and Α. Χαλκιά, Eds. (2005). Η Παραγωγή του Κοινωνικού
Σώματος. Αθήνα, Κατάρτι και Δίνη, Φεμινιστικό Περιοδικό.
Το ειδικό τεύχος του φεμινιστικού περιοδικού Δίνη, με θέμα την παραγωγή του "κοινωνικού σώματος", επιθυμεί να συνεισφέρει στην αποδόμηση της "ύποπτης γενικότητας" του σώματος, αλλά και να προχωρήσει πέρα από αυτό. Στοχεύει στη μελέτη και την ανάλυση των τρόπων με τους οποίους το σώμα, ο ορισμός και οι πρακτικές του αποτελούν κάτι παραπάνω από ένα (φυσικό) γεγονός, αποτελούν ένα κοινωνικό επίτευγμα κεντρικής σημασίας για τη σύσταση και τη διακυβέρνηση των σύγχρονων κοινωνιών. Η ευρύτερη θεωρητική συζήτηση στην οποία εντάσσονται η αποδόμηση και η επαν-εννοιολόγηση του έμφυλου υποκειμένου που επιχειρεί του έργο της Τζούντιθ Μπάτλερ εξελίσσεται με πληθώρα εντάσεων από τη δεκαετία του 1990 και μετά, κυρίως στις ΗΠΑ, την Αγγλία και τη Γαλλία. Κάτω από την επίδραση των αναζητήσεων και αναθεωρήσεων του μεταμοντερνισμού, οι οποίες καθιστούν προβληματική οποιαδήποτε επίκληση του "ατόμου" ως σταθερής και αυτονόητης οντότητας ή αναλυτικής κατηγορίας, και μαζί με τη φεμινιστική εμπειρία των κινδύνων που ελλοχεύουν όταν "οι γυναίκες" θεωρούνται εκ προοιμίου ομογενοποιημένη κατηγορία, αναπτύχθηκε εκ νέου μια συζήτηση που είχε ως αντικείμενο το αυτονόητο των διαφόρων φεμινισμών, την κατηγορία "γυναίκα". Το πρακτικό εγχείρημα του τεύχους είναι να συμβάλλει στο σύγχρονο διεπιστημονικό έργο διερεύνησης του κόμβου λόγος-εξουσία στον τόπο του έμφυλου σώματος. Το τεύχος μπορεί να συνεισφέρει στη σχετική διεθνή επιστημονική συζήτηση μέσα από τη συστηματική ανάλυση διαφορετικών τρόπων κατασκευής του κοινωνικού σώματος, διαδικασιών εξάλειψης αλλά και παραγωγής συγκεκριμένων ειδών σωμάτων και υποκειμένων.
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