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Pandora's Senses
The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text
Vered Lev Kenaan
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
The notorious image of Pandora haunts mythology: a woman created as punishment for the crimes of man, she is the bearer of hope yet also responsible for the Earth’s desolation. She binds together perpetuating dichotomies that underlie the most fundamental aspects of the Western canon:  beauty and evil, body and soul, depth and superficiality, truth and lie. Speaking in multiplicity, Pandora emerges as the first sign of female complexity.
     In this compelling study, Vered Lev Kenaan offers a radical revision of the Greek myth of the first woman. She argues that Pandora leaves a decisive mark on ancient poetics and shows that we can unravel the profound impact of Pandora’s image once we recognize that Pandora embodies the very idea of the ancient literary text. Locating the myth of the first woman right at the heart of feminist interrogation of gender and textuality, Pandora’s Senses moves beyond a feminist critique of masculine hegemony by challenging the reading of Pandora as a one-dimensional embodiment of the misogynist vision of the feminine. Uncovering Pandora as a textual principle operating outside of the feminine, Lev Kenaan shows the centrality of this iconic figure among the poetics of such central genres as the cosmological and didactic epic, the Platonic dialogue, the love elegy, and the ancient novel. Pandora’s Senses innovates our understanding of gender as a critical lens through which to view ancient literature.
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Paternal Tyranny
Arcangela Tarabotti
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day.

Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its women of rights accorded even to foreigners. She accuses parents of treating convents as dumping grounds for disabled, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted daughters. Finally, through compelling feminist readings of the Bible and other religious works, Tarabotti demonstrates that women are clearly men's equals in God's eyes.

An avenging angel who dared to speak out for the rights of women nearly four centuries ago, Arcangela Tarabotti can now finally be heard.
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The Perils of Populism
Sarah Tobias
Rutgers University Press, 2022
From Donald Trump in the U.S. to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Narendra Modi in India, right-wing populist leaders have taken power in many parts of the world. While each country’s populist movement is distinct, they are united by several key features, including the presence of a boastful strongman leader and the scapegoating of vulnerable populations, especially immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, and women.
 
The Perils of Populism shows how a feminist lens can help diagnose the factors behind the global rise of right-wing populism and teach us how to resist the threat it presents to democracy. Featuring interdisciplinary essays about politics in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and India from a variety of acclaimed theorists and activists, the volume contributes to a rapidly expanding literature on gender and the far right. Together, these chapters offer a truly intersectional analysis of the problem, addressing everything from how populism has thrived in a “post-truth” era to the ways it appeals to working-class voters looking for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet the authors also find reasons to be hopeful, as they showcase forms of grassroots feminist activism that challenge right-wing populism by advocating for racial and economic justice.
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The Play in the System
The Art of Parasitical Resistance
Anna Watkins Fisher
Duke University Press, 2020
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.
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Poetics of the Flesh
Mayra Rivera
Duke University Press, 2015
In Poetics of the Flesh Mayra Rivera offers poetic reflections on how we understand our carnal relationship to the world, at once spiritual, organic, and social. She connects conversations about corporeality in theology, political theory, and continental philosophy to show the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and modern Western philosophers conceive of the "body" and "flesh.” Her readings of the biblical writings of John and Paul as well as the work of Tertullian illustrate how Christian ideas of flesh influenced the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, and inform her readings of Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, and others. Rivera also furthers developments in new materialism by exploring the intersections among bodies, material elements, social arrangements, and discourses through body and flesh. By painting a complex picture of bodies, and by developing an account of how the social materializes in flesh, Rivera provides a new way to understand gender and race.
 
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Poison Woman
Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture
Christine L. Marran
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Based on the lives and crimes of no less than twenty real women, dokufu (poison women) narratives emerged as a powerful presence in Japan during the 1870s. During this tumultuous time, as the nation moved from feudalism to oligarchic government, such accounts articulated the politics and position of underclass women, sexual morality, and female suffrage. Over the next century, the figure of the oversexed female criminal, usually guilty of robbery or murder, became ubiquitous in modern Japanese culture.

In Poison Woman, Christine L. Marran investigates this powerful icon, its shifting meanings, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place in Japan. She begins by considering Meiji gesaku literature, in which female criminality was often medically defined and marginalized as abnormal. She describes the small newspapers (koshinbun) that originally reported on poison women, establishing journalistic and legal conventions for future fiction about them. She examines zange, or confessional narratives, of female and male ex-convicts from the turn of the century, then reveals how medical and psychoanalytical literature of the 1920s and 1930s offered contradictory explanations of the female criminal as an everywoman or a historical victim of social circumstances and the press. She concludes by exploring postwar pulp fiction (kasutori), film and underground theater of the 1970s, and the feminist writer Tomioka Taeko’s take on the transgressive woman.

Persistent stories about poison women illustrate how a few violent acts by women were transformed into myriad ideological, social, and moral tales that deployed notions of female sexual desire and womanhood. Bringing together literary criticism, the history of science, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Poison Woman delves into genre and gender in ways that implicate both in projects of nation-building.

Christine L. Marran is associate professor of Japanese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota.

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Politics with Beauvoir
Freedom in the Encounter
Lori Jo Marso
Duke University Press, 2017
In Politics with Beauvoir Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. Politics with Beauvoir gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional.
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Post-Borderlandia
Chicana Literature and Gender Variant Critique
Cuevas, T. Jackie
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Honorable Mention, 2018 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association
2019 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist​


Bringing Chicana/o studies into conversation with queer theory and transgender studies, Post-Borderlandia examines why gender variance is such a core theme in contemporary Chicana and Chicanx narratives. It considers how Chicana butch lesbians and Chicanx trans people are not only challenging heteropatriarchal norms, but also departing from mainstream conceptions of queerness and gender identification.  

Expanding on Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic formulation of the Chicana as transformer of the “borderlands,” Jackie Cuevas explores how a new generation of Chicanx writers, performers, and filmmakers are imagining a “post-borderlands” subjectivity, where shifting national, racial, class, sexual, and gender identifications produce complex power dynamics. In addition, Cuevas offers fresh archival analysis of the Chicana feminist canon to reveal how queer gender variance has always been crucial to this literary tradition. 
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A Postcapitalist Politics
J.K. Gibson-Graham
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies.

A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic “development” pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action.

J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Postcolonial Hauntings
Play and Transnational Feminism
Sushmita Chatterjee
University of Illinois Press, 2024

Often examined separately, play and hauntings in fact act together to frame postcolonial issues. Sushmita Chatterjee showcases their braided workings in social and political fabrics. Drawing on this intertwined idea of play and hauntings, Chatterjee goes to the heart of conundrums within transnational postcolonial feminisms by examining the impossible echoes of translations, differing renditions of queer, and the possibilities of solidarity beyond the fraternal friendships that cement nation-states. Meaning-plays, or slippages through language systems as we move from one language to another, play a pivotal role in a global world. As Chatterjee shows, an attentiveness to meaning-plays discerns the past and present, here and there, and moves us toward responsive ethics in our theories and activisms.

Insightful and stimulating, Postcolonial Hauntings centers the inextricable work of play and hauntings as a braided ethics for postcolonial transnational struggles.

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Postconflict Utopias
Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia
Tania Lizarazo
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Black women in the department of Chocó, Colombia, respond to the violence endemic to their region with activism and storytelling. Tania Lizarazo focuses on members of COCOMACIA, a Black farmers’ association that defends communities and territories along the nation’s Pacific lowlands’ rivers. Drawing on the life stories of members, Lizarazo explains how Chocó’s Black Colombian women answered firsthand experiences of violence with a dedication to survival and activism. Survival amid armed conflict proves to be an embodied practice. Day by day, the women imagine what memory, peace, and justice could look like when the bloodshed ends. Though peace may seem impossible, wishing and working for a better world motivates these women to steadily dismantle the scaffolding of violence built around their lives.

A merger of eyewitness accounts and theory, Postconflict Utopias explores the links between lived knowledge and survival while revealing the power unleashed when women ask the simple question, “Why not?”

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Postfeminist War
Women in the Media-Military-Industrial Complex
Mary Douglas Vavrus
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Media representations and practices that have emerged out of contemporary wars have been well documented by a wide array of books and articles. These treatments, however, have been less attentive to how cultural constructions of military personnel and war itself figure in the depiction of the incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Post-Feminist War, Mary Douglas Vavrus argues that all of these identity categories are integral to our understanding of those fighting, saved, or victimized by war. She considers two important questions: how the construction of gender, race, and class in media are productive of régimes of truth regarding war and military life, and how such constructions may also intensify militarism. By examining news and documentary media produced since September 11, 2001, Vavrus demonstrates that news narratives that include women use feminism selectively in gender equality narratives, which tend to reinforce historically resonant gender, race, and class identity constructions. She ultimately asserts that such reporting advances post-feminism, which, in tandem with banal militarism, subtly pushes military solutions for an array of problems women and girls face. 
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Pragmatism and Feminism
Reweaving the Social Fabric
Charlene Haddock Seigfried
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Though many pioneering feminists were deeply influenced by American pragmatism, their contemporary followers have generally ignored that tradition because of its marginalization by a philosophical mainstream intent on neutral analyses devoid of subjectivity. In this revealing work, Charlene Haddock Seigfried effectively reunites two major social and philosophical movements, arguing that pragmatism, because of its focus on the emancipatory potential of everyday experiences, offers feminism its most viable and powerful philosophical foundation.

With careful attention to their interwoven histories and contemporary concerns, Pragmatism and Feminism effectively invigorates both traditions, opening them to new interpretations and appropriations and asserting their timely philosophical relevance. This foundational work in feminist theory simultaneously invites and guides future scholarship in an area of rapidly emerging significance.
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Praising Girls
The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930
Henrietta Rix Wood
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
In Praising Girls, Henrietta Rix Wood explores how ordinary schoolgirls engaged in extraordinary rhetorical activities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. Focusing on high school girls’ public writing, Wood analyzes newspaper editorials and articles, creative writing projects, yearbook entries, and literary magazines, revealing how young women employed epideictic rhetoric—traditionally used to praise and blame in ceremonial situations—to define their individual and collective identities. Many girls, Wood argues, intervened rhetorically in national and international discourses on class, race, education, immigration, racism, and imperialism, confronting the gender politics that denigrated young women and often deprived them of positions of authority.
 
The site of the study—Kansas City, Missouri—reflects the diverse rhetorical experiences of girls in cities across the United States at the beginning of the last century. Four case studies examine the writing of privileged white girls at a college preparatory school, Native American girls at an off-reservation boarding school, African American girls at a segregated high school, and working- and middle-class girls at a large whites-only public high school. Wood’s analysis reveals a contemporary concept of epideictic rhetoric that accounts for issues of gender, race, class, and age.
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Proper Women
Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran
Fae Chubin
Temple University Press, 2024
Proper Women tells the unprecedented story of an NGO-led “women’s empowerment” program in Tehran that was created to serve young, impoverished Iranians and Afghan refugees. Fae Chubin recounts the well-intentioned efforts of cosmopolitan NGO administrators whose loyalty to liberal feminist principles of individualism, sexual autonomy, and anti-traditionalism complicated their objective of empowering marginalized women.

Chubin brings attention to the varying class, ethnic, religious, and national identities of NGO staff and clients that shaped their differing understandings of oppression and justice. Her examination of the tensions within the organization reveals why the efforts of the NGO workers failed to gain purchase among the intended beneficiaries.

Proper Women concludes by encouraging feminist activists to not only examine the role of local politics and transnational connections in shaping their definitions of empowerment, but also consider the advantages of a justice-enhancing practice as opposed to justice monism for their target populations.
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Provoking Feminisms
Edited by Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard
University of Chicago Press, 2000

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Psychosomatic
Feminism and the Neurological Body
Elizabeth A. Wilson
Duke University Press, 2004
How can scientific theories contribute to contemporary accounts of embodiment in the humanities and social sciences? In particular, how does neuroscientific research facilitate new approaches to theories of mind and body? Feminists have frequently criticized the neurosciences for biological reductionism, yet, Elizabeth A. Wilson argues, neurological theories—especially certain accounts of depression, sexuality, and emotion—are useful to feminist theories of the body. Rather than pointing toward the conventionalizing tendencies of the neurosciences, Wilson emphasizes their capacity for reinvention and transformation. Focusing on the details of neuronal connections, subcortical pathways, and reflex actions, she suggests that the central and peripheral nervous systems are powerfully allied with sexuality, the affects, emotional states, cognitive appetites, and other organs and bodies in ways not fully appreciated in the feminist literature. Whether reflecting on Simon LeVay’s hypothesis about the brains of gay men, Peter Kramer’s model of depression, or Charles Darwin’s account of trembling and blushing, Wilson is able to show how the neurosciences can be used to reinvigorate feminist theories of the body.
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Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
Sarah Tobias
Rutgers University Press, 2025
There are many sorts of catastrophes, ranging from devastating fires, floods, and earthquakes to sexual violence, genocides, and wars—but this collection of feminist essays focuses upon three broad types: epidemics/pandemics, anti-Black racism, and climate breakdown. These are public catastrophes, profoundly shaped by government action and inaction. The essays reveal that it is impossible to fully understand—or challenge—the structural harms associated with public catastrophe without appreciating their personal dimension, or reckoning with the ways that power thoroughly conditions our experiences as individuals and as members of communities. The public and private are intertwined, and during catastrophes, families and communities become repositories for loss, silence, mourning, witnessing, reconstruction, and reparation. The contributors to this collection examine how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, and how individuals narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss, and how, though both attention or neglect, governments and nonprofits frequently exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities.
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Public Feminisms
From Academy to Community
Edited by Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn
Lever Press, 2023

The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community edited by Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond the traditional academic classroom and scholarly journals to share their work with the public.


Part one explores how feminist scholars engage broader audiences through art, media, and public programming, including essays on a public discussion series teaching intersectional feminist analysis of popular films, and a podcast from Latina scholars discussing issues of reproductive justice, social justice, motherhood, sexuality, race, and gender. Part two focuses on activism and public education, including essays on “Take Back the Night,” and archiving the women’s march protests. Part three turns to public writing and scholarship, including an essay on elevating the perspectives and voices of underrepresented creatives in the film and television industry. Part four explores feminist pedagogies for community engagement and for teaching public feminisms.


Accessible and engaging to a broad range of readers, the essays in this volume are a rich resource for scholars and students interested in infusing their academic knowledge into the public sphere. With this timely book, the editors offer an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and highlight some of the important public-facing work feminist scholars are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
 

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The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics
Women Politicians Write from Prison
Gultan Kisanak
Pluto Press, 2022

Prison writings from twenty-two Kurdish women who were elected to office in Turkey and then imprisoned by the state on political grounds.

Gültan Kışanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakır in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors, and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds.

The Purple Colour of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from twenty-two Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn’t, and the ways in which Turkey’s anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices.

Demonstrating Kurdish women’s ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced – even when behind bars – the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

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Puta Life
Seeing Latinas, Working Sex
Juana María Rodríguez
Duke University Press, 2023
In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work's stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.
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