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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. (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.
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.
Macdonald, M. (1995). Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in
the Popular Media. London, Edward Arnold.
This book reassesses how women are talked about and constructed visually across a range of popular media. Arguing for the importance of a historical approach, this book examines continuities and changes in dominant myths of femininity, especially in the transition from the modern to the postmodern period. The influences of feminism and consumerism on these developments are given particular attention. The book starts with an orientating chapter on the contributions of a variety of disciplines to our understanding of gender in relation to the media. Psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, art history and cultural studies are each critically reviewed, enabling students to compare perspectives and to locate the variety of approaches they may encounter in other readings. A chapter on gender and consumerism and a detailed analysis of myths of femininity are also included. Outlining key theoretical debates in an accessible manner this book offers a wide range of examples from advertising, women's magazines, popular television programmes and mainstream film.
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.
Neuburger, L. d. C. and T. Valentini, Eds. (1996). Women and Terrorism.
New York, St. Martin's Press.
This book, which is intended as a contribution to a better understanding of women's participation in terrorism, deals with four main issues: 1) the study of women's participation in violent terrorist movements to try to discover the key to the psychological and sociological interpretation of their involvement in a life experience with which they are not traditionally associated 2) the different responses to "penintentism" between men and women 3) the psychological and social interpretation of women's support of armed struggle and an enquiry -through the personal experience of the women terrorists interviewed - into the reasons for women's greater resistance to repentance 4) the use in the criminal justice system of the leads this enquiry has furnished for prognostic purposes and to predict and create conditions that facilitate repentance. In formation was collected trough a questionnaire to assemble specific data on the personal experience of each of the women terrorists interviewed. The answers obtained are of the utmost interest. To mention only one, the greater obduracy and "fidelity" to the cause demonstrated by Italian women terrorists as compared to men does not depend on a specific context or culture, but instead seems to be a general "hallmark" of the feminine way of living the subversive violent struggle or the adoption of terroristic ideologies.
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.
Ramazanoglu, C., Holland, Janet. Eds. , Ed. (2002). Feminist Methodology:
Challenges and Choices. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications.
"An accessible, clearly explained review of difficult concepts within this arena as well as relevant debates. Its strengths are in outlining possible considerations that need to be taken into account when making methodological choices. It also clearly explains how these choices impact knowledge production. This book would undoubtedly be of considerable use to anyone seeking to understand and get to grips with feminist methodological issues" - Feminism and Psychology
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.
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.
Valentini, L. d. C. N. a. T., Ed. (1996). Women and Terrorism. New York, St. Martin's Press.
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