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Lesbian Porn Magazines and the Sex Wars: Reimagining Sex, Power, and Identity
2023Elizabeth Groeneveld
Lesbian Porn Magazines and the Sex Wars re-examines the heated debates about the politics of sexuality known as the sex wars, investigating how they were fundamentally engaged in the complex intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Groeneveld presents an accessible and fascinating framing of lesbian sex magazines as activist media texts engaged in education, community building, and dialogue, amplifying theories or writers and artists across the intersectional spectrum. Making use of archival material and a cohort of lesbian radical porn magazines, the book posits that collectively these magazines helped create and circulate new ideas about sex, power, and identity. The chapters cover lesbian public culture, trans self-representation, AIDS activism, and issues of consent.
This is an essential intervention into sexuality studies and is suitable for students and scholars in gender and sexuality studies, sociology, media studies, literature, and cultural studies. [From the publisher]
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Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices
2019Amy K. Milligan
Jewish Bodylore: Feminist and Queer Ethnographies of Folk Practices explores the Jewish body and its symbology as a space for identity communication, applying the tools of bodylore (the folkloric study of the body) to the Jewish body in ways that are in line both with feminist and queer theory. The text centers a feminist folkloric approach to embodiment while simultaneously recognizing its overlaps with the study of Jewish bodies and symbols. It investigates Jewish embodiment with a keen eye to that which breaks from tradition. Consideration is given to the ways in which bodies intersect with time and space in the synagogue, within religious movements, in secular culture, and in childhood ritual. Representing a unique approach to contemporary Jewish Studies, this book argues that Jewish bodies and the intersections they represent are at the core of understanding the contemporary Jewish experience. ... [From the publisher]
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Domestic Workers of the World Unite!: A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights
2017Jennifer N. Fish
Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often ‘off the books,’ working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in the growing informal global economy. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of research, plus interviews with a number of key movement leaders and domestic workers, Jennifer N. Fish presents the compelling stories of the pioneering women who, while struggling to fight for rights in their own countries, mobilized transnationally to enact change. The book takes us to Geneva, where domestic workers organized, negotiated, and successfully received the first-ever granting of international standards for care work protections by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization. This landmark victory not only legitimizes the importance of these household laborers’ demands for respect and recognition, but also signals the need to consider human rights as a central component of workers’ rights… [From Amazon.com]
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Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age
2016Elizabeth Groeneveld
Making Feminist Media provides new ways of thinking about the vibrant media and craft cultures generated by Riot Grrrl and feminism’s third wave. It focuses on a cluster of feminist publications―including BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl―that began as zines in the 1990s. By tracking their successes and failures, this book provides insight into the politics of feminism’s recent past. … [From Amazon.com]
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Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women: Kallah’s Choice
2014Amy K. Milligan
Hair, Headwear, and Orthodox Jewish Women comments on hair covering based on an ethnographic study of the lives of Orthodox Jewish women in a small non-metropolitan synagogue. It brings the often overlooked stories of these women to the forefront and probes questions as to how their location in a small community affects their behavioral choices, particularly regarding the folk practice of hair covering. A kallah, or bride, makes the decision as to whether or not she will cover her hair after marriage. In doing so, she externally announces her religious affiliation, in particular her commitment to maintaining an Orthodox Jewish home. Hair covering practices are also unique to women’s traditions and point out the importance of examining the women, especially because their cultural roles may be marginalized in studies as a result of their lack of a central role in worship. This study questions their contribution to Orthodoxy as well as their concept of Jewish identity and the ways in which they negotiate this identity with ritualized and traditional behavior, ultimately bringing into question the meaning of tradition in a modern world. [From Amazon.com]
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Rhetorics of Motherhood
2013Lindal Buchanan
Becoming a mother profoundly alters one’s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth. Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens…. [From Amazon.com]
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The Nevergiveups: The Extraordinary Life Stories of Six South African Grandmothers
2013Jo-Anne Smetherham, Eric Miller, and Jennifer N. Fish
The Nevergiveups tells the extraordinary life stories of six grandmothers now living in Cape Town, South Africa. These women have experienced hardship and sorrow, yet their stories are cameos of ingenuity and resilience – a testimony to the indomitable human spirit. The biographies describe how a group of ordinary women have experienced the dramatic transitions of the past six decades, between rural and urban lifestyles, African and Western cultures, the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, and from a time in which the elderly expect to be cared for, to one in which they are thrust into a care giving role once again as providers for their Aids-orphaned grandchildren and unemployed adult members. The poignant biographies are accompanied by the portraits and handwritten memories of 17 of their fellow grandmothers from Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids, a grassroots organization formed by grandmothers in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha. The book is a tribute to these grandmothers and others like them, across South Africa: a generation of unsung heroes. [From Amazon.com]
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Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies
2010Lindal Buchanan (Editor) and Kathleen J. Ryan (Editor)
Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies gathers significant, oft-cited scholarship about feminism and rhetoric into one convenient volume. Essays examine the formation of the vibrant and growing field of feminist rhetoric; feminist historiographic research methods and methodologies; and women’s distinct sites, genres, and styles of rhetoric. The book’s most innovative and pedagogically useful feature is its presentation of controversies in the form of case studies, each consisting of exchanges between or among scholars about significant questions. These debates have shaped the field’s past and continue to influence its present and future directions. The collection provides both students and teachers with an accessible introduction to and comprehensive overview of the intersections of feminisms and rhetorics. [From the Publisher]
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Women's Activism in South Africa: Working Across Divides
2009Hannah Britton, Jennifer Fish, and Sheila Meintjes
Women's Activism in South Africa provides the most comprehensive collection of women's experiences within civil society since the 1994 transition. This book captures South African women's stories of collective activism and social change at a crucial point for the future of democracy in the country, if not the continent. Pulling together the voices of activists and scholars, South Africa's path to democracy and the assurance of gender rights emerge as a complex journey of both successes and challenges. The collection elucidates a new form of pragmatic feminism, building upon the elasticity between the state and civil society. What the cases demonstrate is that while the state itself may not be a panacea, it still represents a key source of power and the primary locus of vital resources, including the rights of citizenship, access to basic needs, and the promise of protection from gender-based violence - all central to women's particular needs in South Africa.
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Little House, Long Shadow Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture
2008Anita Clair Fellman
Fellman shows that Laura Ingalls Wilder's magical Little House series contained a covert political message that made many readers comfortable with the resurgence of conservatism. Because both Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, opposed the New Deal programs being implemented as they wrote, their books use family history as an argument against the state's protection of individuals from economic uncertainty, emphasizing the Ingalls family's isolation and resilience in the face of crises. Fellman argues that the books' popularity helped lay the groundwork for a negative response to big government and a positive view of political individualism, contributing to the acceptance of contemporary conservatism while perpetuating a mythic West. Fellman also explores the continuing presence of the books--and their message--in modern cultural institutions from classrooms to tourism, newspaper editorials to Internet message boards.
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Domestic Democracy: At Home in South Africa
2006Jennifer N. Fish
Domestic Democracy chronicles the struggle to achieve labor rights for this largest sector of women workers during South Africa’s early transition from apartheid to democracy. Based on an extensive ethnography with the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union, this book shows how women’s activism assured that the building of democracy included the establishment of rights and protections for the women who worked in isolation in private households. Through the voices of domestic workers, parliamentarians, activists, and employers, this book captures the struggle to realize rights ‘at home,’ the larger tensions of social and political transition, and the wider potential for human rights to prevail through the collective organization of women. [From the publisher]
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Rethinking Canada the Promise of Women's History
1991Veronica Strong-Boag (Editor) and Anita Clair Fellman (Editor)
The Promise of Women's History presents readings on the key developments in Canadian, and more generally, women's history. A detailed introduction to the volume notes that society must know about the past in order to understand the present and to confront the future. Once we learn, for example, that the nation's constitutional arrangements have, since their beginnings, disadvantaged women as citizens; that knowledge can become the basis for demands of redress. Once we discover that women routinely have been paid less than men for comparable labor, the case for negotiating a new deal has begun. In this third edition there are 27 readings, 8 of which have been retained from the previous second edition. There are 19 new selections which focus on a range of issues including race and ethnicity, work, sexual orientation, and disability. The readings are also organized into 4 sections: Pre-Confederation, Post-Confederation, Post-WWI, and Post-WWII. Each selection is introduced by the editors, who place the reading within its historical and historiographical contexts.
A gallery of books by faculty in the Department of Women's Studies, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.
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