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Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination

Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism's second wave. From its stirrings in the midcentury-when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion-to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement. 

The Janes HBO documentary

The Janes tells the story of a group of unlikely outlaws. Defying the state legislature that outlawed abortion, the Catholic Church that condemned it, and the Chicago Mob that was profiting from it, the members of Jane risked their personal and professional lives to help women in need. In the pre-Roe v. Wade era –– a time when abortion was a crime in most states and even circulating information about abortion was a felony in Illinois –– the Janes provided low-cost and free abortions to an estimated 11,000 women.  Resource guide.

Black and Sexy: a Framework of Racialized Sexuality

This book offers a unique understanding of African American populations and their articulation of sexuality and race by introducing a comprehensive sexological model, Black Sexual Epistemology. Tracie Q. Gilbert draws from theoretical perspectives of anti-Blackness, ethno-sexuality, Performative Blackness and African-centered epistemology to implicate race as an inextricable factor in the sexual structures and schema of African American people. Chapters identify and introduce a sex-positive and comprehensive sexological model, Black Sexual Epistemology, through which Black sexuality can be understood and navigated in the contemporary era. This model presents empirical data for effectively applying previous critical race perspectives and uniquely demonstrates how Black sexual experience can be better understood and reimagined for greater community development and healing. 

Feminism and Film

Maggie Humm begins with an in-depth historical survey of contemporary feminist theory, visual aesthetics and film theory, with a particular focus on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks. Subsequent chapters examine the issues of reproduction, pornography and the gaze, autobiography and literary theory, postmodernism, Black feminism and 'the personal is political' in relation to a variety of mainstream and independent films, including Klute, Dead Ringers, A Question of Silence, Orlandoand Daughters of the Dust.

Building Inclusive Cities: Women's Safety and the Right to the City

Building on a growing movement within developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as Europe and North America, this book documents cutting edge practice and builds theory around a rights based approach to women's safety in the context of poverty reduction and social inclusion. Drawing upon two decades of research and grassroots action on safer cities for women and everyone, this book is about the right to an inclusive city. The first part of the book describes the challenges that women face regarding access to essential services, housing security, liveability and mobility. The second part of the book critically examines programs, projects and ideas that are working to make cities safer. 

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible brings together 37 essential essays written by leading international scholars, examining crucial points of analysis within the field of feminist Hebrew Bible studies. Organized into four major areas - globalization, neoliberalism,media, and intersectionality - the essays collectively provide vibrant, relevant, and innovative contributions to the field. The topics of analysis focus heavily on gender and queer identity, with essays touching on African, Korean, and European feminist hermeneutics, womanist and interreligiousreadings, ecofeminist and animal biblical studies, migration biblical studies, the role of gender binary voices in evangelical-egalitarian approaches, and the examination of scripture in light of trans women's voices. The volume also includes essays examining the Old Testament as recited in music,literature, film, and video games. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible charts a culturally, hermeneutically, and exegetically cutting-edge path for the ongoing development of biblical studies grounded in feminist, womanist, gender, and queer perspectives.

Fearing the Black Body: the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals--where fat bodies were once praised--showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Black Trans Feminism

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender's destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di'Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

Disability, Gender, and the Trajectories of Power

This book argues for the rights of women with disabilities, who live on the periphery of society, and seeks to eradicate the exclusion and stigma that are part of their lives. It brings together the perspectives of academicians and activists in trying to understand the various social issues faced by women with disabilities and argues for a society where they are not denied respect, equality, and justice. Filling the gap in the existing feminist research, this book seeks to influence the way in which society treats women with disabilities and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the field of women’s rights, disability rights, and rehabilitation.

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

This 21st-century activist's guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender carves out a path to collective liberation. Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologeticprovides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory

With chapters written by world-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, [this] book explores thinking on key topics in current feminist discourse, including: · Feminist subjectivity - from identity, difference, and intersectionality to affect, sex and the body · Feminist texts - writing, reading, genre and critique · Feminism and the world - from power, trauma and value to technology, migration and community Including insights from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, political science and sociology.

Independent Voices

This open access database features several collections, including Feminist: 

Over 75 magazines, newsletters, and newspapers created by activists and collectives that helped propel the second wave of feminism from the late sixties and early seventies through the end of the 20th century. Groups represented by these publications include the Redstockings, New York Radical Women, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and many others. Abortion, rape, unequal pay, women in the service, child care, women’s self-help, pornography, gender roles, and many other major issues of the period were extensively covered in the pages of the feminist press.