"Gloria Steinem is one of the country's most influential and innovative writers and activists. In Revolution from Within, Marilyn: Norma Jean, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she created a dialogue with her readers that shapes the way we think about human possibilities. In this newest six-part adventure of essays that "begin in a personal place, and arrive at a larger point," she offers more revolutionary ideas, compassionate insights, and one truly over-the-top fantasy. Three of its six parts appear here (...) for the first time. Three of them have a seed, seedling, or partly grown plant in a previously published article. As Steinem writes in the Preface, "Each of these six parts is rather like a condensed book....Since there seems to be no genre for this, I've found myself explaining it this way: If you added water to any of these parts, it would become a book."" "What If Freud Were Phyllis is the ultimate send-up - with footnotes. By gender-reversing Sigmund's world and work, and drawing on new scholarship that shocks, Steinem creates a hilarious and chilling portrait of the most haunting father-figure of them all - and raises questions about what might have been haunting him, and why he is still haunting us." "The Strongest Woman in the World is the story of one woman whose courage in testing her own limits broke the boundaries of gender and gave Steinem insights into the politics of muscle - and into herself." "Sex, Lies and Advertising updates and greatly expands Steinem's famous expose of advertising's stranglehold on women's magazines and its control over much of what we see and read - with a new and urgent call to action." "The Masculinization of Wealth shows us the ways class works in reverse for women in families of inherited wealth, because "the closer we are to power, the more passive we have to be kept." It reshapes our understanding of class, and exposes the other end of the feminization of poverty." "Revaluing Economics demystifies budgets, from our own checkbooks to national and international accounting systems, as statements of values that render invisible most of the world's productive work, especially that done by women - and offers practical ways out." "Doing Sixty is a spirited, provocative, intimate essay written at the approach of Steinem's sixtieth birthday - for her "beloved age peers" and "to help younger readers worry less about early successes or failures" - as she realizes why women, herself included, become more radical with age."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The author, a feminist writer and professor, shares insights and strategies on teaching.

Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

The use of "theory" in feminist analysis has been said to threaten feminism as a political force. This collection of work by leading feminist scholars engages with the question of the political status of poststructuralism theory within feminism. Against the view that the use of post-structuralism necessarily weakens feminism, 'Feminists Theorize the Political' affirms the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential. In laying the theoretical groundwork for the volume, Butler and Scott posed a number of questions to (...) prominent legal scholars, literary critics, philosophers, political theorists, historians, and cultural theorists. The essays do not settle the questions but generate new and productive directions for them. The volume as a whole valorizes the unsettling power and politics of theory. The essays in 'Feminists Theorize the Political' speak to the questions that emerge from the convergence of feminism and poststructuralism: What happens to feminist critique when traditional foundations--experience, history, universal norms--are called into question? Can feminist theory problematize the notion of the subject without losing its political effectivity? Which version of the subject is to questioned, and how does that questioning open up possibilities for reformulating agency, power, and sites of political resistance? What are the consequences of a specifically feminist reformulation of difference? What are the uses and limits of a poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of racial and class differences, the position of the subaltern? This anthology represents a diverse array of theoretical work within feminist theory with strong political stakes. Although not all of the authors subscribe to poststructuralism, (and few would concede post-structuralism is a monolithic enterprise), each offers an innovative feminist analysis that is in some way motivated in and by the poststructuralist challenge. 'Feminists Theorize The Political' addresses a range of feminist concerns, including productive freedom, anti-discrimination law, rape, and formulating power in terms of exclusion, difference and hierarchy. (shrink)

Denefield argues that the wholesale rejection of feminism is not because of some unconscious conspiracy in the media to undermine women, but because the women's movement does not offer what young women want.

Conflict and cooperation between generations of radical feminists.

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

Confessional modes of self-representation have become crucial in feminist epistemologies that broaden and contextualize the location and production of knowledge. In some versions of confessional feminism, the insertion of “I” is reflective, the product of an uncomplicated notion of experience that shuttles into academic discourse apersonal truth. In contrast to reflective intrusions of the first person, reflexive confessing is primarily a questioning mode that imposes self-vigilance on the process of self positioning.

In dit spraakmakend boek wordt het Amerikaans feministische discours over geweld op vrouwen en over 'date rape' op de korrel genomen. De auteur beschuldigt orthodoxe feministen ervan vrouwen te beroven van hun eigen seksualiteit, alsof zij geen verlangens zouden hebben, maar weerloze wezens zijn, die zich moeten hoeden voor verleiding en misleiding. Het boek vormt een kritiek op het zogenaamde 'slachtofferfeminisme'.

Examines changes in the women's movement in the twenty years following women's suffrage, and describes the complex issues of that period.

In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number (...) of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on. (shrink)

The fourteen essays and speeches collected in this work, several of them published for the first time, span almost a decade of this Black lesbian feminnist's work. Lorde is unflinching in her observations and is lucid and clarifying in her coverage of a range of essential topics.

A collection of essays explore such topics as feminist politics, sex, racism, careers, identity, and abortion.