These essays describe diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience in modern Western societies. They combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust ...constraints on freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of “gender” for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residencies. Aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory are analyzed, such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman’s life story. The phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing are also considered.
Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people ...of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast,Gaming at the Edgebuilds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter.
InGaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates.
Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.
As Marko Dumančić writes in his introduction to Gender,
Sexuality, and the Cold War , "despite the centrality of gender
and sexuality in human relations, their scholarly study has played
a secondary ...role in the history of the Cold War. . . . It is not an
exaggeration to say that few were left unaffected by Cold War
gender politics; even those who were in charge of producing,
disseminating, and enforcing cultural norms were called on to live
by the gender and sexuality models into which they breathed life."
This underscores the importance of this volume, as here scholars
tackle issues ranging from depictions of masculinity during the
all-consuming space race, to the vibrant activism of Indian peasant
women during this period, to the policing of sexuality inside the
militaries of the world. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold
War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose combined
research spans fifteen countries across five continents, claiming a
place as the first volume to examine how issues of gender and
sexuality impacted both the domestic and foreign policies of
states, far beyond the borders of the United States, during the
tumult of the Cold War.
Synthesizing the results of the extensive research on women and gender done over the last twenty years, Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker provide an accessible overview of the scholarship ...on women and gender in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. The book is organized along thematic lines that reflect major focuses of research in this area—gender and work, gender and the state, gender and law, gender and religion, and feminist movements—and each chapter is written by a scholar who has done original research on the topic.
In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be ...a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England. In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire. Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials,Abraham in Armsreconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.
The age of Augustus has long been recognised as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on ‘traditional’ feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain ...women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. This book takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and L. Junius Moderatus Columella, the book argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted public life in the early Roman empire.
What did sex mean for ordinary people before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, who were often pitied by later generations as repressed, unfulfilled and full of moral anxiety? This book ...provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award-winning authors look beyond conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank testimonies from a socially and geographically diverse range of individuals, the book explores a spectrum of sexual experiences, from learning about sex and sexual practices in courtship, to attitudes to the body, marital ideals and birth control. It demonstrates that while the era's emphasis on silence and strict moral codes could for some be a source of inhibition and dissatisfaction, for many the culture of privacy and innocence was central to fulfilling and pleasurable intimate lives.
Gendered Commodity Chains is the first book to consider the fundamental role of gender in global commodity chains. It challenges long-held assumptions of global economic systems by identifying the ...crucial role social reproduction plays in production and by declaring the household as an important site of production. In affirming the importance of women's work in global production, this cutting-edge volume fills an important gender gap in the field of global commodity and value chain analysis.With thirteen chapters by an international group of scholars from sociology, anthropology, economics, women's studies, and geography, this volume begins with an eye-opening feminist critique of existing commodity chain literature. Throughout its remaining five parts, Gendered Commodity Chains addresses ways women's work can be integrated into commodity chain research, the forms women's labor takes, threats to social reproduction, the impact of indigenous and peasant households on commodity chains, the rapidly expanding arenas of global carework and sex trafficking, and finally, opportunities for worker resistance. This broadly interdisciplinary volume provides conceptual and methodological guides for academics, graduate students, researchers, and activists interested in the gendered nature of commodity chains.
