A timely intervention into debates on the representation of feminist and feminine identities in contemporary visual culture. The essays in this collection interrogate how and why certain formulations of feminism and femininity are currently prevalent in mainstream cinema and television, offering new insights into postfeminist media phenomena.
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A landmark manifesto" (The New York Times) that's a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential. In her famed TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than eleven million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Lean In continues that conversation, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can. Sandberg, COO of Meta (previously called Facebook) from 2008-2022, provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home.
Women have fulfilled film roles that exhibit their historically subservient or sexualised positions in society, among others. Over the decades, the gender identity of women has fluctuated to include powerful women, emotionally strong women, lesbian women, and even neurologically atypical women. These identities reflect the change in societal norms and what is now acknowledged as more likely and more mainstream. The evolution of society’s views of women can be mapped through these roles; from 1950’s America where women were depicted as the counterpart to male characters and their masculinity either as a threat or support to the patriarchal norms; to more recent times, where these norms have been questioned, challenged, deconstructed and reconstructed to include women in a more equitable balance. The fight for equal access, equal pay and equal standing still exists in all walks of life and different cultures requiring continued scrutiny of the norms that made that fight necessary. The essays offer a unique vantage of the changing culture and conversations that allowed, encouraged, and praised an evolution of women’s roles. They strive to represent the issues faced by women, from the early heyday of Hollywood through to films as recent as 2007; examining depictions of the masculine gaze, mental and physical oppression, the mother figure, as well as how these roles may develop in the future. The book contains valuable material for film students at an undergraduate or post-graduate level, as well as scholars from a range of disciplines including cultural studies, media studies, film studies and women’s and gender studies.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women.” —Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, in The Atlantic “One of the most important books of the current moment.”—Time “A rousing call to action... It should be required reading for everyone.”—Gabrielle Union, author of We’re Going to Need More Wine A potent and electrifying critique of today’s feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in black feminism Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others? In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.
Essential reading for our times, as women are pulling together to demand their rights— A landmark portrait of women, men, and power in a transformed world. “Anchored by data and aromatized by anecdotes, [Rosin] concludes that women are gaining the upper hand." –The Washington Post Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But Hanna Rosin was the first to notice that this long-held truth is, astonishingly, no longer true. Today, by almost every measure, women are no longer gaining on men: They have pulled decisively ahead. And “the end of men”—the title of Rosin’s Atlantic cover story on the subject—has entered the lexicon as dramatically as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” Susan Faludi’s “backlash,” and Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” once did. In this landmark book, Rosin reveals how our current state of affairs is radically shifting the power dynamics between men and women at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more. With wide-ranging curiosity and insight unhampered by assumptions or ideology, Rosin shows how the radically different ways men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up—even kill—has turned the big picture upside down. And in The End of Men she helps us see how, regardless of gender, we can adapt to the new reality and channel it for a better future.
With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance. Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments—in Victorian magic’s obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography’s search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis’s multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism’s discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Ivanka is donating the unpaid portion of her advance and all future royalties received from Women Who Work to the Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund, a donor advised fund that will make grants to organizations that empower and educate women and girls.* "This is a chatty step-by-step guide to living a happy life and getting ahead in a career." —USA Today "The advice is spot-on for everyone, not just women." —Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness I believe that when it comes to women and work, there isn’t one right answer. The only person who can create a life you’ll love is you. Our grandmothers fought for the right to work. Our mothers fought for the choice to be in an office or to stay at home. Our generation is the first to fully embrace and celebrate the fact that our lives are multidimensional. Thanks to the women who came before us and paved the way, we can create the lives we want to lead—which look different for each of us. I’ve been fortunate to be able to build my career around my passions, from real estate to fashion. But my professional titles only begin to describe who I am and what I value. I have been an executive and an entrepreneur, but also—and just as importantly—a wife, mother, daughter, and friend. To me, “work” encompasses my efforts to succeed in all of these areas. After appearing on The Apprentice years ago and receiving a flood of letters from young women asking for guidance, I realized the need for more female leaders to speak out publicly in order to change the way society thinks and talks about “women who work.” So I created a forum to do just that. This book evolves the conversation that started on IvankaTrump.com, where so many incredible women (and men!) have shared their experiences, advice, ambitions, and passions. Women who work lead meetings and train for marathons. We learn how to cook and how to code. We inspire our employees and our children. We innovate at our current jobs and start new businesses. Women Who Work will equip you with the best skills I’ve learned from some of the amazing people I’ve met, on subjects such as identifying opportunities, shifting careers smoothly, negotiating, leading teams, starting companies, managing work and family, and helping change the system to make it better for women—now and in the future. I hope it will inspire you to redefine success and architect a life that honors your individual passions and priorities, in a way only you can. * The Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund (the “Fund”) is a donor advised fund that supports the economic empowerment of women and girls. Ivanka Trump is the grant advisor to the Fund and sole member of IT WWW Pub, LLC (the “LLC”), which receives royalties from the publication of Women Who Work. The LLC will contribute a minimum $425,000 to the Fund, which is the unpaid portion of the advance, net of expenses. In addition, the LLC will contribute all future royalties it receives that are in excess of the advance to the Fund during the period from May 1, 2017 to May 1, 2022.
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Women, Inequality and Media Work investigates how women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries. Examining women’s place in the production of media is vital to understanding the broader and related question of how women are (mis)represented in media content. This book goes behind the camera to explore the world of women working in media industries and unpacks the systemic gender inequality that they experience at work. It argues that women internalize their experience of gender inequality by adopting various beliefs: whether it is that gender does not matter in the workplace; that the workplace is now post-feminist; or by adopting a sense of self as liminal, neither fully included nor excluded from the industry. Drawing on detailed academic research and empirical investigation, Women, Inequality and Media Work is an important and timely book for students, researchers and those working in media industries.