At a time when women are being exhorted to "lean in" and work harder to get ahead, Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism encourages both women and men to "let go" instead. The book explores alternatives to the belief that individual achievement, accumulation, and attention-seeking are the road to happiness and satisfaction in life. Letting go demands a radical recognition that the values, relationships, and structures of our neoliberal (competitive, striving, accumulating, consuming, exploiting, oppressive) society are harmful both on a personal level and, especially important, on a social and environmental level.

There is a huge difference between letting go and "chilling out." In a lean-in society, self-care is promoted as something women and men should do to learn how to "relax" and find a comfortable work-life balance. By contrast, a feminist letting-go and its attendant self-care have the potential to be a radical act of awakening to social and environmental injustice and a call to activism.

Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine, Professor Emerita of Sociology and founding director of women's studies at Nazareth College, is coeditor of The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities.

Donna King, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is author of Doing Their Share to Save the Planet: Children and Environmental Crisis and coeditor of Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective (also published by Vanderbilt).

Introduction | Letting Go Feminism: Reconnecting Self-Care and Social Justice
Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine

Part One: Theoretical Perspectives

1. Toward a Feminist Theory of Letting Go
Donna King

2. On the Interdependence of Personal and Social Transformation
David R. Loy

3. Leaning In and Letting Go: Feminist Tools for Valuing Nonwork
Jennifer Randles

4. Letting Go of Normal when “Normal” Is Pathological, or Why Feminism Is a Gift to Men
Robert Jensen

Part Two: Personal Essays

5. When “Straight-Acting” Lost Its Luster: Letting Go of Masculine Privilege
Anthony C. Ocampo

6. The Gold Pen
Deborah J. Cohan

7. Whether Willing or Unwilling: The Personal, the Professional, and Two Years of Too Much
Meghan M. Sweeney

8. Letting Go: How Does a Feminist Retire?
Diane E. Levy

9. When Enough Is Enough: African American Women Reclaiming Themselves
Shirley A. Jackson

Part Three: Ethnographies

10. What to Let Go: Insights from Online Cervical Cancer Narratives
Tracy B. Citeroni

11. Stay-at-Home Fathers: Are Domestic Men Bucking Hegemonic Masculinity?
Steven Farough

12. From Retail Banking to Credit Counseling: Opting Out and Tuning In
Kevin J. Delaney

13. Keeping Up Appearances: Working Class Feminists Speak Out about the Success Model in Academia
Roxanne Gerbrandt and Liza Kurtz

14. Letting Go and Having Fun: Redefining Aging in America
Deana A. Rohlinger and Haley Gentile

Part Four: Ecological Perspectives

15. Letting Go and Getting Real: Applying Buddhist Principles to Address Environmental Crisis
Janine Schipper

16. Consuming Violence: Oil and Food in Everyday Life 201
Patricia Widener

17. Growing Food, Growing Justice: Letting Go by Holding On to the Feminine Principle
Leontina Hormel and Ryanne Pilgeram

Part Five: Visionary Feminism

18. Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In
bell hooks

Contributors
Index