While IR theorists are increasingly critical of neorealist assumptions about the state and the international system, few have explored the gendered construction of the state and its implications for IR. Recognizing this, the authors of this collection explore how core concepts of political and IR theory - the state, sovereignty, power - are reframed through feminist lenses.
A collection of essays from feminist critics, each of which explores the history of the English novel, literature's place in cultural debate and women's studies. They begin with the fictions of the late 17th century and end with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
Gendered Lives takes a regional approach to examine gender issues from an anthropological perspective with a focus on globalization and intersectionality. Chapters present contributors' ethnographic research, contextualizing their findings within four geographic regions: Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Global North. Each regional section begins with an overview of the broader historical, social, and gendered contexts, which situate the regions within larger global linkages. These introductions also feature short project/people profiles that highlight the work of community leaders or non-governmental organizations active in gender-related issues. Each research-based chapter begins with a chapter overview and learning objectives and closes with discussion questions and resources for further exploration. This modular, regional approach allows instructors to select the regions and cases they want to use in their courses. While they can be used separately, the chapters are connected through the book's central themes of globalization and intersectionality. An OER version of this course is freely available thanks to the generous support of SUNY OER Services. Access the book online at https://milneopentextbooks.org/gendered-lives-global-issues/.
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.
Contextualizing theoretical debates about the political uses of gendered humor and female excess, this book explores bold new ways in which a number of contemporary Latin American women authors approach questions of identity and community. The author examines the connections among strategic uses of humor, women's bodies, and resistance in works of fiction by Laura Esquivel, Ana Lydia Vega, Luisa Valenzuela, Armonía Somers, and Alicia Borinsky. She shows how the interarticulation of the comic and comic-grotesque vision with different types of excessive female bodies can result in new configurations of female subjectivity.
This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general. Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)
Gender Warriors: Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy offers classroom-ready original essays outlining contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms in urban fantasy and examining how those cultural categories are reinforced and unraveled. The essays explore the foundations and evolutions of urban fantasy and presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources, focusing not only on popular examples, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Underworld, but also on less studied works, for instance Penny Dreadful and Anita Blake. The authors address the sociocultural institutions that bind gender to the body and shape our views of gendered norms, inviting students of all experience levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender and the production of genre and generic conventions. The text unpacks cultural norms of gender and addresses issues of identity construction within an endlessly evolving genre. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender and the kick-ass female urban fantasy warrior have upended and reinforced a broad range of expectations and tropes, making it a fascinating text for any course, such as first-year studies, literature, film, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, and more.
Widely praised as an outstanding contribution to social welfare and feminist scholarship, Regulating the Lives of Women (1988, 1996) was one of the first books to apply a race and gender lens to the U.S. welfare state. The first two editions successfully exposed how myths and stereotypes built into welfare state rules and regulations define women as "deserving" or "undeserving" of aid depending on their race, class, gender, and marital status. Based on considerable new research, the preface to this third edition explains the rise of Neoliberal policies in the mid-1970s, the strategies deployed since then to dismantle the welfare state, and the impact of this sea change on women and the welfare state after 1996. Published upon the twentieth anniversary of "welfare reform," Regulating the Lives of Women offers a timely reminder that public policy continues to punish poor women, especially single mothers-of-color for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles. The book will appeal to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students of social work, sociology, history, public policy, political science, and women, gender, and black studies – as well as today’s researchers and activists.
In so doing it puts forward a distinctive thesis, namely that within late modernity gender and sexuality are being reworked in terms of categories of reflexivity and risk. It shows that this reworking places increasing significance on issues of mobility and identity in late modernity. It therefore outlines the politics of mobility in regard to identity, suggesting that mobility is an important but often neglected source of power in late modernity. Revisions: gender and sexuality in late modernity will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates, research students and academics working in the fields of feminist theory, social theory, sociology, women's studies and cultural studies."--Jacket.
Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion. The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.
