Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination is Changing the World

Explores the controversial implications of lesbian insemination

Each year hundreds of children around the world are born to lesbian mothers who conceived through alternative insemination. This unique form of family-making creates families with no legal or psychological father, and challenges some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to be a family. How, and why, do lesbians use insemination to build their families? How could it best be protected by law? Is insemination the ultimate in lesbian liberation, or a sell-out to nuclear family norms? How are race, class, feminism, and human engineering involved? Drawing on legal findings and personal interviews, as well as medical and psychoanalytic research, sociologist Amy Agigian looks at the impact and potential of this form of reproduction.

Baby Steps is the first in-depth discussion of the issues and questions raised by lesbian insemination, and the book has been designed to serve the interests of general readers and health care providers as well as teachers and students in women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, sociology, legal studies, and bioethics.

“Baby Steps is a fascinating study of the world of lesbian alternative insemination. Agigian has taken the unique step of critiquing the institutions and society in which lesbian families exist, rather than the families and conception methods themselves. In doing so, she brings into focus the institutional discrimination that has been perpetrated against lesbian families, particularly within the medical and legal systems, and justly argues that such reactions require radical revision. She tracks the politicization of lesbian alternative insemination from an invisible and largely autonomous practice to its commercialization and mainstreaming, which although medically safer, shifts the reproductive control and accessibility.�
—Dr. Ruth McNair, Senior Lecturer, Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne

“Baby Steps presents a fascinating glance at our cultural and technological possibilities for a more gender-fluid and nurture-centered future.�
—Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

“Patriarchy is a longstanding, durable institution and this book exhilarates any reader—heterosexual or lesbian—who is weary of living under its mantle.�
—Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Vermont and author of Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment

Winner of the NWSA 2008 Gloria Anzulúa Book Prize

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book is the first to show how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women's opportunities today.

Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance

The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women's experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger.

Interviews with 58 Black women explore the restrictive myth of the "Strong Black Woman." In particular, Beauboeuf-Lafontant highlights the physical and emotional toll of this performance of invulnerability, which leaves many Black women suffering from eating disorders and depression.

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and voice-centered research, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences on normative Black femininity. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary quality of "authentic" Black womanhood, maintaining that the expectation of strength creates a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and imbalances of power.

"Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman makes an important contribution to the literature. No other work systematically studies the ways black women internalize and resist strong black woman discourse. Beauboeuf-Lafontant convincingly argues that investment in the strong black woman myth injures black women and strengthens the racist divisions between women."—Maxine Craig, author of Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race

Sexism in America:Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future

An expose of the pervasive and rampant discrimination in virutally every aspect of women's lives.
PW REVIEW: "This is an excellent easible deciperable text for history, sociology &women's studies studies--and even older feminists...Berg offers a wakeup call for young women entering the cultural and career trenches on what went wrong and how to fix it."
LJ REview: "Highly recommended...Each chapter ...offers an impassioned plea:feminism in not dead, but there is still a great need...to fight for the right of women in America. As Berg aptly states in her conclusion'Everyone who believes in gender equality ...must join together to push for progressives policies that will enhance all of our lives."

Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender and the Space of Modernity

"A bold and challenging consideration of questions of development, economic globalization, communities and subjectivity from a unique feminist perspective. A must-read book for those who wish to understand restructuring and resistance in this era of intensified globalization." ---Isabella C. Bakker, York University

"Bergeron's pathbreaking analysis challenges orthodox development theories, questions current feminist economic thinking and highlights crucial new gendered challenges to globalization." ---Jane Parpart, Dalhousie University

"Cutting-edge scholarship. Bergeron deftly engages the complexity of current debates while retaining clarity, improving analyses, and illuminating alternatives."---V. S. Peterson, University of Arizona

By tracing out the intersection between the imagined space of the national economy and the gendered construction of "expert" knowledge in development thought, Suzanne Bergeron provides a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice. By elaborating a framework of including/excluding economic subjects and activities in development economics, she provides a rich account of the role that economists have played in framing the contested political and cultural space of development.

Bergeron's account of the construction of the national economy as an object of development policy follows its shifting meanings through modernization and growth models, dependency theory, structural adjustment, and contemporary debates about globalization and highlights how intersections of nation and economy are based on gendered and colonial scripts. The author's analysis of development debates effectively demonstrates that critics of development who ignore economists' nation stories may actually bolster the formation they are attempting to subvert. Fragments of Development is essential reading for those interested in development studies, feminist economics, international political economy, and globalization studies.

Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault

Women's responses to rape have taken many forms over the past three decades, from guerrilla actions targeting individual assailants to the founding of rape crisis centers. This timely book illuminates the movement's importance to the broader women's movement and discusses the public policy implications of this activism.

Maria Bevacqua locates the roots of rape consciousness, traces the evolution of an anti-rape ideology on the feminist agenda, describes how the rape issue moved to the wider public agenda, and investigates the various manifestations and strategies of anti-rape politics. She examines how feminists first articulated the rape experience as a women's issue, traces the evolution of anti-rape ideology over a thirty-year period, and considers recent tensions in the movement, including allegations of a feminist date rape hype in the media and in the academy.

The author untangles the public and legislative responses to the rape issue, analyzing both the political context that made policymakers receptive to anti-rape goals and the effect of the anti-rape movement on American political and social life.

Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema

Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze� to the “quantum gaze� in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes� to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.� David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.� Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…�

Marcelline Block (BA, Harvard; MA, Princeton), is completing a PhD at Princeton, and two Graduate Certificates: one in the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and the second in Media and Modernity. She has published in Excavatio: Realism and Naturalism in French Studies (vol. 22); The Harvard French Review (vol. 2); LINE (vols. 1 and 2); Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'Histoire (vol. 96); Women in French Studies (vol. 16). She is an editor of The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest from 1500 to the Present (Blackwell).

“Feminist film theory presented in the lucid critical polyphony gathered with unerring critical instinct by Marcelline Block will insist upon a dynamic and mobile attitude facing the gaze.� - Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

“This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism. The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century. This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others. I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.� - Marshall Blonsky, PhD, New School University

“This volume will be invaluable in helping readers to look afresh at questions of gender, sexuality, and representation in the light of the methodological, aesthetic, and strategic shifts outlined here…Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema includes fresh, bold, and new voices alongside very well established scholars in the field, and will no doubt make an important and dynamic contribution to conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary film theory and history. I look forward to teaching sections of this book in a variety of courses, including my courses on film theory, women and film, and the Road Movie.� -Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies; Director, Program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania

“I wish to emphasize how strong a contribution Marcelline Block’s edited volume makes to scholarship about gender, power, and film in the post-World War II era. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema uniquely impacts this field…This project makes an important contribution to the fields of women and gender studies, film and cultural studies. It is a major resource for research and teaching in undergraduate and graduate programs across the humanities, visual arts, and social sciences. I intend to use this book in my own program at Brooklyn College Graduate Center.� -Immanuel Ness, Professor, Brooklyn College Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Marcelline Block has edited a compelling collection of essays which includes illuminating discussions of contemporary European and North American filmmakers in which issues pertaining to film theory and women’s studies intersect…This is a rich volume and important new book that recontextualizes key concepts by renowned feminist film theorists, and succeeds in reframing those crucial early insights within a new conceptual and historical configuration of feminist film theory in tune with recent cinematic production and historical and cultural realities.� -Gabriel Riera, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Chicago

Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative

Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative investigates the impact of gender stereotypes on medical narratives, considering works from diverse languages, time periods, genres and media, and interrogates theories of gender in the provocative new field of the medical humanities. This volume is prefaced by Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Director and Founder of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

“In light of current debates over healthcare, this volume could not be more timely. As a whole, it critiques the claim of the mimetic and objective, recognizes the instrumentality of representation, and examines definitions of normal and the stigmatization of disease and disfigurement. These chapters underscore the collection’s historical range and geographical diversity. Each essay highlights the uniqueness of a specific moment, but also points towards the continuity of narrative, representational models and their interpretation across cultures.” —CARL FISHER, Chair, Comparative World Literature and Classics, California State University Long Beach

“The topic of the book is timely, innovative, important. What is important about the volume is its emphasis on issues of medicine in representation and its focus specifically on gender. A further innovative aspect is its interdisciplinary focus including American and European literature, the media, philosophy and cultural studies and medicine. Articles are on a broad range of texts from classic fiction to House MD and Children of Men (2006). It will be a valuable contribution to the fields of medicine, narrative, literature and the media.” —E. ANN KAPLAN, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University; Director, The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook; Past President, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies

“The volume conjoins important new areas of study in gender, medicine and cultural studies of medicine. One of its great strengths is its historical and disciplinary range from a consideration of medieval art to contemporary television. The essays include treatments of the medical gaze in literary works as well as engagement with the literariness and visuality of medical publications. The emphasis on gender gives this volume a tight, unifying focus. I am persuaded that it will have a broad audience among scholars across disciplines and will be widely taught.” —PRISCILLA WALD, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University

URL: http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/Gender-Scripts-in-Medicine-and-Narrative1-4438-2230-2.htm

Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema

Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…”

This newly issued paperback version (2010) features an afterword by the editor.

Marcelline Block (BA, Harvard; MA, Princeton; PhD Candidate, Princeton), co-edited Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative (Cambridge Scholars), as well as other publications. Block’s writing has appeared in The Many Ways We Talk About Death in Contemporary Society (eds. Margaret Souza and Christina Staudt); Excavatio, vol. XXII: Naturalism and Realism in Film Studies; The Harvard French Review; Vendetta: Essays on Honor and Revenge (ed. Giovanna Summerfield); Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, and Women in French Studies, among other publications.

“Feminist film theory presented in the lucid critical polyphony gathered with unerring critical instinct by Marcelline Block will insist upon a dynamic and mobile attitude facing the gaze.”

- Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

“This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism. The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century. This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others. I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.”

- Marshall Blonsky, PhD, New School University

“This volume will be invaluable in helping readers to look afresh at questions of gender, sexuality, and representation in the light of the methodological, aesthetic, and strategic shifts outlined here…Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema includes fresh, bold, and new voices alongside very well established scholars in the field, and will no doubt make an important and dynamic contribution to conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary film theory and history. I look forward to teaching sections of this book in a variety of courses, including my courses on film theory, women and film, and the Road Movie.”

- Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies; Director, Program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania

“Marcelline Block has edited a compelling collection of essays which includes illuminating discussions of contemporary European and North American filmmakers in which issues pertaining to film theory and women’s studies intersect…This is a rich volume and important new book that recontextualizes key concepts by renowned feminist film theorists, and succeeds in reframing those crucial early insights within a new conceptual and historical configuration of feminist film theory in tune with recent cinematic production and historical and cultural realities.”

- Gabriel Riera, Associate Professor, Dept. of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Chicago

“I will say at the outset that the volume makes valuable, original, and often unique contributions to a remarkably wide array of feminist and cinematic fields. Its essays should be required reading for scholars, students, and general readers who care about cinema’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary culture at large. The range and variety of the chapters constitute one of the book’s best assets, especially since their diversified contents rarely lose sight of the collection’s unifying concern(s) with the ways in which major issues of feminist and postfeminist theory are currently articulated by and through engagements with the politics, aesthetics, and practices of gender, sexuality, authorship, and representation in today’s moving-image media. A welcome byproduct of Marcelline Block’s approach is the rare (and badly needed) consideration given to filmmakers whose unconventional methods and techniques are chronically overlooked (even by many supposedly enlightened critics) precisely because they grow from a recognition that female/feminist filmmakers must conduct risky experiments with the medium if there is to be a chance of overturning the commercial-patriarchal cinema (a cinéma du papa in every sense) that has dominated and determined patterns of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception since the early days of cinema. I must add a note of appreciation for Marcelline Block’s introduction, which amounts to a concisely written summary of where feminist and postfeminist theory have recently been and are situated at the present time, and a richly suggestive view of where they are likely to be in the near future. Marcelline Block and her colleagues are in the forefront of the growing number of scholars who remember that Mulvey’s influential essay concludes with a call for using film theory as a political weapon capable of challenging, disputing, and ultimately overturning the engines of patriarchal bias that have operated for more than a century through the easily exploited conduits of mass-media visual expression. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema will play an important part in academic, sociopolitical, and film-cultural skirmishes for a long time to come.”

- David Sterritt, Ph.D., School of the Arts, Columbia University, Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art; Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University Chair, National Society of Film Critics, Editorial Board, Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Goldring Arts Journalism, Syracuse University

New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation

“Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is ‘finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.’ Bobel’s work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism.�—Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation
New Blood offers a fresh interdisciplinary look at feminism-in-flux. For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second- and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women’s movement.

Through her critical ethnographic lens, Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category “gender�) and challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, New Blood reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists “culture jamming� commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing “holistic womb health,� and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today’s feminism-on-the-ground—indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.

Chris Bobel is an associate professor and chair of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of The Paradox of Natural Mothering.

The Practice of U.S. Women's History

Gayle Gullett, author of Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 "Beautifully written, [this anthology] allows the reader to experience the excitement of the field: the thrill of new insights, the denouncement of the passé and the call to seek another horizon."

Book Description In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political. They have entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself.
In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. They examine, for example, how conceptions of gender shaped immigration officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights. Reading the past with all of the messiness, contradictions, and excitement inherent in real life, this book is a provocative meditation on the state of the field.

Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

"Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo are groundbreaking." --AnaLouise Keating, Texas Woman's University

"Deeply expressive, intellectually profound, and very moving. It offers new paths into, beside, and through identity politics." --Katie King, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Encarnación takes a new look at identity, following the contemporary movement away from the fixed categories of identity politics toward a more fluid conception of the intersections between identities and communities. The works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo enable us to examine how identities shift and intersect with others through processes of "incarnation." Since the 1980s, critics have come to equate these writers with Chicana feminist identity politics. This critical trend, however, has been unable to account, as does Encarnación, for these writers' increasing emphasis on bodies that are sick, disabled, permeable, and, oftentimes, mystical.

Concerned equally with the medical-surgical interventions available in our postmodern age and with the ways of understanding bodies in the Native American and Catholic traditions these writers invoke, Encarnación develops a model for identity that expands beyond the boundaries of individual bodies. The book argues that this model has greater utility for feminism than identity politics because it values human variability, sensation, and openness to others.

Living Ideas: A Memoir of The Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies

This is the first memoir by a founding coordinator. The Berkeley program was started by students in the early seventies. Even as it built curriculum, founded "theories of women's studies" through its publications, encouraged departments to notice the study of women and tried to nurture students, it experienced competition within the program and hostility from without by faculty who did not think a prestigious university was the place for a "political" study. The memoir interweaves stories of the founding with the "personal," the author's search for equal relationships and

"Beautifully written. This is exactly how I remember it."

"LIVING IDEAS goes fearlessly into the emotional and sexual tumult of the seventies and eighties."

"I very much enjoyed reading your beautifully written memoir...I could not put it down, identifying with so many of your struggles...I appreciated the way you interspersed your career struggles with that of your love life - a struggle most of us contended with..."

"I had to put it down: it took me back to painful years in grad school. But I also underlined passages for my daughter." 

"I appreciate...how you expressed the psssion of the times, the underlying impetuses of the movement, the deep (and corrosive) conflicts ensuing, and both the gains and 'prices paid,' individually and collectively."

URL: http://www.gloriabowles.net

Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages

Nonfiction Anthology: Women's Issues & Studies.
Paperback: 268 pages
Publisher: All Things That Matter Press.

Synopsis: "This unique collection includes over fifty articles by more than thirty-five diverse American women who revisit, celebrate, and share defining moments in their lives. Readers will see the universal in milestones of body, mind, family, career, and personal empowerment—whether joyous or difficult, chosen or unexpected, common or rare. These are the poignant passages of women, told by talented and award winning writers: intimate glimpses into the lives of our sisters, friends, aunts, mentors, wives, grandmothers, partners, mothers, daughters—ourselves."

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

Winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Queer Studies, this groundbreaking ethnographic study of racial stratification in queer and straight strip clubs examines the lives and working conditions of Black and Latina dancers in strip clubs in New York City and Oakland, California. Through interviews with dancers, customers, managers, bouncers, and other strip club employees, Siobhan Brooks explores the connections between race, desire, and commodification in what she terms "desire industries." The study finds that even in times of economic gains for a minority of Black and Latino/a middle-class populations, sexual stereotypes and racial hypersexualization continue to affect many women of color who work in the sex industry, leading to more exposure to violence, wage gaps, and less access to more lucrative shifts and performance venues. Through her insightful and illuminating analysis, Brooks makes the case that racialized erotic capital is central to what owners think will sell, what customers will buy, how dancers negotiate those desire landscapes, and the male and female consumption of desire.

Siobhan Brooks is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Temple University.

Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture

Fairies, unruly women, and vestigial Catholicism constituted a frequently invoked triad in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama which has seldom been critically examined and therefore constitutes a significant lacuna in scholarly treatments of early modern theater, including the work of Shakespeare. Fairy tradition has lost out in scholarly critical convention to the more masculine mythologies of Christianity and classical Greece and Rome, in which female deities either serve masculine gods or are themselves masculinized (i.e., Diana as a buckskinned warrior). However, the fairy tradition is every bit as significant in our critical attempts to situate early modern texts in their historical contexts as the references to classical texts and struggles associated with state-mandated religious beliefs are widely agreed to be. "Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith" examines the ways in which the fairy, rebellious woman, quasi-Catholic trio repeatedly stages resistance to early modern conceptions of appropriate class and gender conduct and state-mandated religion in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Merry Wives of Windsor", "Cymbeline", "All's Well That Ends Well", and Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist".

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned.

Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and / or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?

Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right

While the Christian Right has spearheaded a variety of antigay projects over the past fifteen years, including interventions in public schools, antigay-rights initiatives, and support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, observers of the institutionalized Christian Right have also noted a softening of antigay public rhetoric. Sin, Sex, and Democracy analyzes these two ostensibly conflicting phenomena. Examining Christian witnessing tracts, the ex-gay movement, and recent linkages between gays and terrorists, Cynthia Burack argues that as the Christian Right has become a more sophisticated interest group, leaders have become adept at tailoring different messages for mainstream audiences and for the internal pedagogical processes of Christian conservatives. Understanding the rhetoric and the theological convictions that lie behind them, Burack claims, is essential to better understand how American politics work and how to effectively respond to exclusionary forms of political thought and practice.

"This book offers a meticulously detailed account of the way in which antigay discourse is constructed and employed by the Christian Right and those closely associated with it. It is a topic of significance and central to the academic study of politics and cultural practice of politics, particularly in the United States." -- Angelia R. Wilson, author of Below the Belt: Sexuality, Religion, and the American South

"The appeal of this book is the niche it fills: at a time when critics take well-worn and cheap shots at the Christian Right ill fitting the seriousness of the times, this author demands that critics take the Christian Right seriously, not only politically, but theologically." -- Amy E. Ansell, editor of Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics

Advice from the Top: What Minority Women Say About Their Career Success

Advice From the Top offers tips and advice for careers in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds.  Campbell interviewed fourteen extraordinary minority women who shared their insights and views on what constitutes success,  factors contributing to success, obstacles encountered and what women can do today to get ahead.  They include millionaire business owners like Cathy Hughes and Eunice Dudley, nonprofit executive Jane Smith, former White House staffer Zina Pierre, television anchor, Andrea Roane and medical doctor, Bea Muglia.

"By sharing the stories of fourteen successful women of color, Valencia Campbell helps remove myths and mystery from the concept of success and ground it squarely in the context of gender, race and class realities.  This is a useful examination for all of us."  Ellen Bravo, Former Director, 9to5,  National Association of Working Women.

URL: http://www.advicefromtopwomen.com

Daughters of Kerala

Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the UN The quality of the writers and the accessible directness of the translations make this book a particular pleasure to read.

Book Description: Kerala, one of the smallest states in India, is located in the country's southwest corner. Known for its great beauty, religious diversity, and zero population growth, the region also boasts an exceptionally high literacy rate?reportedly above 91 percent?resulting in a large readership for books, journals, and newspapers. The quality of Kerala's literary production is very high, and this anthology represents some of its best short stories. Though educated and enterprising, women from this area face the same problems as women the world over. The stories in this collection explore their lives, giving readers everywhere a greater understanding of what it means to be a daughter of Kerala.

URL: http://www.achammachander.com

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth

Get a detailed look at the Thai sex/gender system--through analysis of the personal stories from transgendered youth in Thailand.

The Thai term sao braphet song (a "second type of woman") describes males who reject the gender of masculinity for femininity. Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth uses the narrative method, stories in the words of these "second type of women" to analyze these transgendered experiences. This previously ignored perspective of the Thai sex/gender system gained through this theoretical and methodological approach offers students and general readers a rich, more readily accessible foundation of knowledge about gendered subjectivity and sex/gender systems.

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth features in-depth, autobiographical life histories from individual Thai transgendered youth. Life stories, told in the participants' own words, provides an engaging, at times touching, always insightful look at Thai culture's sex/gender system. The authors then expertly analyze the narratives to illuminate common themes and constructions within this group, allowing an opportunity for contrast and discussion on transgender experiences in other nations.

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth analyzes the major themes in the stories, including: identities definitions and descriptive labels etiologies of sao braphet song-ness the notion of acceptance narrator motivations for participating in the project Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth is illuminating, reflective reading for educators, undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, or anyone interested in discovering more about transgenderism in a specific cultural context.

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture

Introduction and Table of Contents available at:
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/excotnat.html

Description

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women--from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization--into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.