A classroom resource for instructors that includes full syllabi and teaching modules, Feminist Practices will be of interest to anyone who teaches in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.  Feminist Practices is intended for use in classrooms and to spark creative ideas for teaching a diverse array of topics.

What makes a practice feminist? What is at stake in claiming the feminist label? Whether within a university context or in larger national and global ones, feminist projects involve challenging established relations of power (critique), envisioning alternative possibilities (theory), and employing activism to change social relations. By taking diverse forms of feminist practice as its focal point, this course reader investigates how to study the complexity of women’s and men’s lives in ways that take race, gender-power, ethnicity, class, and nationality seriously. Feminist Practices also shows how the production of such feminist knowledge challenges long-established beliefs about the world.

Topics covered include

• Gendered labor,
• Commercialization of sexuality and reproduction,
• Love and marriage in the twenty-first century,
• Violence against women,
• Varieties of feminist activism, and
• Women’s leadership and governance.

Feminist Practices draws upon articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to explore the nature of feminist practices in the twenty-first century and the range of issues these practices address. Organized thematically the collection captures the complexity of a global movement that emerges in the context of local struggles over diverse modes of injustice.

Mary Hawkesworth is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is a political scientist trained in feminist theory and has conducted extensive research in women and politics, gender, and contemporary feminist activism. Hawkesworth is currently Editor in Chief for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, an internationally recognized journal for feminist scholarship.