Introduction to Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, Second Edition, reflects the exciting changes taking place in this field. Emphasizing both interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, this innovative mix of anthology and textbook includes key primary historical sources, debates on contemporary issues, and recent work in science, technology, and digital cultures. Readings from a range of genres--including poetry, short stories, op-eds, and feminist magazine articles--complement the scholarly selections and acknowledge the roots of creative and personal expression in the field. While the majority of selections are foundational texts, the book also integrates new work from established scholars and emerging voices to expand current debates in the field. The text is enhanced by thorough overviews that begin each section, robust and engaging pedagogy that encourages students to think critically and self-reflexively-and also to take action-as well as supplemental online resources for instructors.
This edited collection addresses the institutional context and social issues in which teaching the women's studies introductory course is embedded and provides readers with practical classroom strategies to meet the challenges raised. The collection serves as a resource and preparatory text for all teachers of the course including experienced teachers, less experienced teachers, new faculty, and graduate student teaching assistants. The collection will also be of interest to educational scholars of feminist and progressive pedagogies and all teachers interested in innovative practices. The contributors discuss the larger political context in which the course has become a central representative of women's studies to a growing, although less feminist-identified, population. Increased enrollments and changes in student population are noted as a result, in part, of the popularity of Introduction to Women's Studies courses in fulfilling GED and diversity requirements. New forms of student resistance in a climate of backlash and changes in course content in response to internal and external challenges are also discussed. Evidence is provided for an emerging paradigm in the conceptualization of the introductory course as a result of challenges to racism, heterosexism, and classism in women's studies voiced by women of color and others in the 1980s and 1990s. Sensationalist charges that women's studies teachers, including those who teach the Introduction to Women's Studies course, are the academic shock troops of a monolithic feminism are challenged and refuted by the collection's contributors who share their struggles to make possible classrooms in which informed dialogue and disagreement are valued.
Following the structure of the successful first edition of Gendered Intersections, this second edition examines the intersections across and between gender, race, culture, class, ability, sexuality, age and geographical location from the diverse perspectives of academics, artists and activists. Using a variety of mediums - academic research, poetry, statistics, visual essays, fiction, emails and music - this collection offers a unique exploration of gender through issues such as Aboriginal self-governance, poverty, work, spirituality, globalization and community activism. This new edition brings a greater focus on politics, and gender and the law. It also includes access to a Gendered Intersections website, which contains several performances by poets and a Gendered Intersections Quiz, which highlights the historical and contemporary contributions of women and non-hegemonic men to Canadian society.
A jargon-free, non-technical, and easily accessible introduction to women's studies! All too many students enter academia with the hazy idea that the field of women's studies is restricted to housework, birth control, and Susan B. Anthony. Their first encounter with a women's studies textbook is likely to focus on the history and sociology of women's lives. While these topics are important, the emphasis on them has led to neglect of equally important issues. Transforming the Disciplines: A Women's Studies Primer is one of the first women's studies textbooks to show feminist scholarship as an active force, changing the way we study such diverse fields as architecture, bioethics, history, mathematics, religion, and sports studies. Although this text was designed as an introduction to women's studies, it is also rewarding for upper-level or graduate students who want to understand the pervasive effects of feminist theory. Most chapters provide a bibliography or list of further reading of significant works. Its clear, jargon-free prose makes feminist thought accessible to general readers without sacrificing the revolutionary power of its ideas. In almost thirty essays, covering a broad range of subjects from anthropology to chemistry to rhetoric, Transforming the Disciplines exemplifies the changes achieved by feminist thought. Transforming the Disciplines: combines a high standard of writing and scholarship with personal insight includes both traditional academic arguments and alternative, non-agonistic forms of discussion embraces an international scope challenges traditional assumptions, models, and methodologies offers an inter- and multidisciplinary approach strengthens readers’understanding of the big picture not only for women but for all disempowered groups critiques feminism as well as patriarchal society Feminist theory is grounded in a questioning of traditional assumptions about what is right, natural, and self-evident, not just about the roles and nature of men and women but about how we think, what we teach, whose experience matters, and what is important. Transforming the Disciplines is the first textbook to show the consequences of those questions -- not the answers themselves, but the consequences of the willingness to ask and the transformations that have occurred when the “right” answers changed.
This book provides a practical, evidence-based guide to teaching introductory Women's and Gender Studies courses. Based on the findings of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project that analyzed 72 Intro students’ written work, the authors equip instructors with key principles that can help them adapt their pedagogy to a range of classroom environments. By putting student learning at the center of course design, the authors invite readers to reflect on their own investments in and goals for the introductory course. The book also draws on the authors’ combined decades of teaching experience, and aims to help instructors anticipate the emotional, intellectual, and interpersonal challenges and rewards of teaching and learning in the introductory WGS course. Chapters focus on course design, including identifying desired learning outcomes (in terms of course content, skills, and dispositions or habits of mind); choosing course materials; pedagogical activities; and assessing student learning. This book will be an invaluable resource for experienced WGS instructors and those seeking or planning to teach it for the first time, including graduate students and high school teachers.
Women’s Studies: The Basics is an accessible introduction into the ever expanding and increasingly relevant field of studies focused on women. Tracing the history of the discipline from its origins, this text sets out the main agendas of women’s studies and feminism, exploring the global development of the subject over time, and highlighting its relevance in the contemporary world. Reflecting the diversity of the field, core themes include: the interdisciplinary nature of women’s studies core feminist theories and the feminist agenda issues of intersectionality: women, race, class and gender women, sexuality and the body global perspectives on the study of women the relationship between women’s studies and gender studies. Providing a firm foundation for all those new to the subject, this book is valuable reading for undergraduates and postgraduates majoring in women’s studies and gender studies, and all those in related disciplines seeking a helpful overview for women-centred, subject specific courses.
In this new collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines provide a critical context for the relationship between feminist pedagogy and academic feminism by exploring the complex ways that critical perspectives can be brought into the classroom. This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives—together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities—necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective. The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism’s role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.
On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.