front cover of Carceral Liberalism
Carceral Liberalism
Feminist Voices against State Violence
Edited by Shreerekha Pillai. Foreword by Demita Frazier
University of Illinois Press, 2023

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.

Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section.

Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora

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Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters
Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann
Sara Lennox
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
Although Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century authors writing in German, her novels and stories have sometimes been viewed narrowly as portraits of women as victims. In this innovative study, Sara Lennox provides a much broader perspective on Bachmann's work, at the same time undertaking an experiment in feminist methodology.Lennox examines Bachmann's poetry and prose in historical context, arguing that the varied feminist interpretations of her writings are the result of shifts in theoretical emphases over a period of more than three decades. Lennox then places her own essays on Bachmann in similar perspective, showing how each piece reflects the historical moment in which it was written. Making use of recent interdisciplinary approaches—Foucauldian theories of sexuality, post-colonial theory, materialist feminism—she explores the extent to which each of her earlier readings was shaped by the methods employed, the questions asked, and the political issues that seemed most germane at the time. Out of this analysis comes a new understanding of the significance of Bachmann's work and new insight into the theory and practice of feminist criticism.
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Changing the Subject
Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India
Srila Roy
Duke University Press, 2022
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
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Chicana Feminisms
A Critical Reader
Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Chicana Feminisms presents new essays on Chicana feminist thought by scholars, creative writers, and artists. This volume moves the field of Chicana feminist theory forward by examining feminist creative expression, the politics of representation, and the realities of Chicana life. Drawing on anthropology, folklore, history, literature, and psychology, the distinguished contributors combine scholarly analysis, personal observations, interviews, letters, visual art, and poetry. The collection is structured as a series of dynamic dialogues: each of the main pieces is followed by an essay responding to or elaborating on its claims. The broad range of perspectives included here highlights the diversity of Chicana experience, particularly the ways it is made more complex by differences in class, age, sexual orientation, language, and region. Together the essayists enact the contentious, passionate conversations that define Chicana feminisms.

The contributors contemplate a number of facets of Chicana experience: life on the Mexico-U.S. border, bilingualism, the problems posed by a culture of repressive sexuality, the ranchera song, and domesticana artistic production. They also look at Chicana feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of Chicanas in the larger Chicano movement, autobiographical writing, and the interplay between gender and ethnicity in the movie Lone Star. Some of the essays are expansive; others—such as Norma Cantú’s discussion of the writing of her fictionalized memoir Canícula—are intimate. All are committed to the transformative powers of critical inquiry and feminist theory.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Ruth Behar, Maylei Blackwell, Norma E. Cantú, Sergio de la Mora, Ann duCille, Michelle Fine, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Rebecca M. Gámez, Jennifer González, Ellie Hernández, Aída Hurtado, Claire Joysmith, Norma Klahn, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Anna Nieto Gomez, Renato Rosaldo, Elba Rosario Sánchez, Marcia Stephenson, Jose Manuel Valenzuela, Patricia Zavella

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Chicana Liberation
Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945-1981
Marisela R. Chávez
University of Illinois Press, 2024

Mexican American women reached across generations to develop a bridging activism that drew on different methods and ideologies to pursue their goals. Marisela R. Chávez uses a wealth of untapped oral histories to reveal the diverse ways activist Mexican American women in Los Angeles claimed their own voices and space while seeking to leverage power. Chávez tells the stories of the people who honed beliefs and practices before the advent of the Chicano movement and the participants in the movement after its launch in the late 1960s. As she shows, Chicanas across generations challenged societal traditions that at first assumed their place on the sidelines and then assigned them second-class status within political structures built on their work. Fueled by a surging pride in their Mexican heritage and indigenous roots, these activists created spaces for themselves that acknowledged their lives as Mexicans and women.

Vivid and compelling, Chicana Liberation reveals the remarkable range of political beliefs and life experiences behind a new activism and feminism shaped by Mexican American women.

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The Chicana Motherwork Anthology
Edited by Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, Christine Vega; Foreword by Ana Castillo
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The Chicana M(other)work Anthology weaves together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor through an intersectional lens. Contributors provide narratives that make feminized labor visible and that prioritize collective action and holistic healing for mother-scholars of color, their children, and their communities within and outside academia.

The volume is organized in four parts: (1) separation, migration, state violence, and detention; (2) Chicana/Latina/WOC mother-activists; (3) intergenerational mothering; and (4) loss, reproductive justice, and holistic pregnancy. Contributors offer a just framework for Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies to thrive within and outside of the academy. They describe a new interpretation of motherwork that addresses the layers of care work needed for collective resistance to structural oppression and inequality.

This anthology is a call to action for justice. Contributions are both theoretical and epistemological, and they offer an understanding of motherwork through Chicana and Women of Color experiences.
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Chicana Movidas
New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era
Edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell
University of Texas Press, 2018

Winner, Best Multiauthor Nonfiction Book, International Latino Book Awards, 2019

With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance.

These are the technologies of resistance documented in Chicana Movidas, a volume that brings together critical biographies of Chicana activists and their bodies of work; essays that focus on understudied organizations, mobilizations, regions, and subjects; examinations of emergent Chicana archives and the politics of collection; and scholarly approaches that challenge the temporal, political, heteronormative, and spatial limits of established Chicano movement narratives. Charting the rise of a field of knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Chicano studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era offers a transgenerational perspective on the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.

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¡Chicana Power!
Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement
By Maylei Blackwell
University of Texas Press, 2011

The first book-length study of women's involvement in the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, ¡Chicana Power! tells the powerful story of the emergence of Chicana feminism within student and community-based organizations throughout southern California and the Southwest. As Chicanos engaged in widespread protest in their struggle for social justice, civil rights, and self-determination, women in el movimiento became increasingly militant about the gap between the rhetoric of equality and the organizational culture that suppressed women's leadership and subjected women to chauvinism, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Based on rich oral histories and extensive archival research, Maylei Blackwell analyzes the struggles over gender and sexuality within the Chicano Movement and illustrates how those struggles produced new forms of racial consciousness, gender awareness, and political identities.

¡Chicana Power! provides a critical genealogy of pioneering Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez and the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, one of the first Latina feminist organizations, who together with other Chicana activists forged an autonomous space for women's political participation and challenged the gendered confines of Chicano nationalism in the movement and in the formation of the field of Chicana studies. She uncovers the multifaceted vision of liberation that continues to reverberate today as contemporary activists, artists, and intellectuals, both grassroots and academic, struggle for, revise, and rework the political legacy of Chicana feminism.

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Chicana Sexuality and Gender
Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art
Debra J. Blake
Duke University Press, 2008
Since the 1980s Chicana writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Alma Luz Villanueva have reworked iconic Mexican cultural symbols such as mother earth goddesses and La Llorona (the Wailing Woman of Mexican folklore), re-imagining them as powerful female figures. After reading the works of Chicana writers who created bold, powerful, and openly sexual female characters, Debra J. Blake wondered how everyday Mexican American women would characterize their own lives in relation to the writers’ radical reconfigurations of female sexuality and gender roles. To find out, Blake gathered oral histories from working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexicanas. In Chicana Sexuality and Gender, she compares the self-representations of these women with fictional and artistic representations by academic-affiliated, professional intellectual Chicana writers and visual artists, including Alma M. López and Yolanda López.

Blake looks at how the Chicana professional intellectuals and the U.S. Mexicana women refigure confining and demeaning constructions of female gender roles and racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. She organizes her analysis around re-imaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, indigenous Mexica goddesses, and La Malinche, the indigenous interpreter for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest. In doing so, Blake reveals how the professional intellectuals and the working-class and semiprofessional women rework or invoke the female icons to confront the repression of female sexuality, limiting gender roles, inequality in male and female relationships, and violence against women. While the representational strategies of the two groups of women are significantly different and the U.S. Mexicanas would not necessarily call themselves feminists, Blake nonetheless illuminates a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking, showing how both groups of women expand lifestyle choices and promote the health and well-being of women of Mexican origin or descent.

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Chick Lit 2
No Chick Vics
Chris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elisabeth Sheffield
University of Alabama Press, 1996
The follow-up volume to Mazza and DeShell’s hugely popular Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction
 
Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers.
 
Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women’s fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, “Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive.”
 
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The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England
Mary Astell
Iter Press, 2013
This book is the most mature and comprehensive statement of Mary Astell’s religious and philosophical views. It also represents the culmination of Astell’s feminist project to teach her fellow women how to lead useful lives of virtue and wisdom. The main purpose of this work is to instruct women about the ultimate nature of reality, the true source of happiness, their duties and obligations to God, and about “how best to live” and how to treat other people. This volume offers the first complete modern version of the 1717 second edition. It provides a fully modernized text, a scholarly introduction, biographical and bibliographical information, general historical-intellectual background, and definitions of obscure and archaic terms.
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Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism
Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights
Jan Feldman
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.
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City of Dreadful Delight
Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London
Judith R. Walkowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1992
From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.

Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.

An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.

A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.
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Claiming the Bicycle
Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America
Sarah Hallenbeck
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Although the impact of the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century on women’s lives has been well documented, rarely have writers considered the role of women’s rhetorical agency in the transformation of bicycle culture and the bicycle itself. In Claiming the Bicycle, Sarah Hallenbeck argues that through their collective rhetorical activities, women who were widely dispersed in space, genre, and intention negotiated what were considered socially acceptable uses of the bicycle, destabilizing cultural assumptions about femininity and gender differences.
 
Hallenbeck describes the masculine culture of the “Ordinary” bicycle of the 1880s and the ways women helped bring about changes in this culture; asserts that women contributed to bicycle design, helping to produce the more gender-neutral “Safety” bicycle in response to discourse about their needs; and analyzes women writers’ uses of the new venue of popular magazines to shape a “bicycle girl” ethos that prompted new identities for women. The author considers not only how technical documents written by women bicyclists encouraged new riders to understand their activity as transforming gender definitions but also how women used bicycling as a rhetorical resource to influence medical discourse about their bodies.
 
Making a significant contribution to studies of feminist rhetorical historiography, rhetorical agency, and technical communication, Claiming the Bicycle asserts the utility of a distributed model of rhetorical agency and accounts for the efforts of widely dispersed actors to harness technology in promoting social change. 
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Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert)
Performance Pieces, 1979–2004
Joanna Frueh
Duke University Press, 2008
The performance artist Joanna Frueh has emerged over the past twenty-five years as a wildly original voice in feminist art. Her uninhibited performances are celebrations of beauty, sensuality, eroticism, and pleasure. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert), which features eighteen of her essential performance texts, is a celebration of this remarkable artist and her work. Arranged chronologically, from The Concupiscent Critic (1979) through Ambrosia (2004), the pieces reveal Frueh’s evolution as an artist and intellectual over the course of her career. Many of these texts have never before been published; others have not been readily available until now. Among the sixteen color photographs in this richly illustrated book are pictures of Frueh performing and images from Joanna in the Desert, a 2006 collaboration between Frueh and the artist and scholar Jill O’Bryan.

Frueh’s performances are unabashedly autobiographical, as likely to reflect her scholarship as a feminist art historian as her love affairs or childhood memories. For Frueh, eros and self-love are part of a revolutionary feminist strategy; her work exemplifies the physicality and embrace of pleasure that she finds wanting in contemporary feminist theory. Scholarly and rigorous yet playful in tone, her performances are joyful, filled with eroticism, flowers, sexy costumes, and beautiful colors, textures, and scents. Recurring themes include Frueh’s passionate attachment to the desert landscape and the idea of transformation: a continual reaching for clarity of thought and feeling.
In an afterword as lyrical and breathless as her performance pieces, Frueh explores her identification with the desert and its influence on her art. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) includes a detailed chronology of Frueh’s performances.

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Close Encounters
Film, Feminism, and Science Ficiton
Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1991

Close Encounters was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Offers new critical approaches to science fiction as represented in film, television, fan culture, and other non-literary media. Addresses the way conventional notions of sexual difference are reworked by science fiction film. Includes the complete script of Peter Wollen's 1987 film Friendship's Death.

Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Janet Bergstrom, Roger Dadoun, Harvey R. Greenberg, M.D., Henry Jenkins III, Enno Patalas, Constance Penley, Vivian Sobchak, Lynn Spigel, and Peter Wollen.

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Cold War Progressives
Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom
Jacqueline Castledine
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historian Jacqueline Castledine tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality.
 
Postwar progressive women and their allies often saw themselves as members of a popular front promoting the rights of workers, women, and African Americans under the banner of peace. However, the Cold War indelibly shaped the contours of their activism. Following the Progressive Party's demise in the 1950s, these activists reentered social and political movements in the early 1960s and met the inescapable reality that their agenda was a casualty of the left-liberal political division of the early Cold War era. Many Americans now viewed peace as a leftist concern associated with Soviet sympathizers and civil rights as the favored cause of liberals. Faced with the dilemma of working to reunite these movements or choosing between them, some progressive women chose to lead such New Left organizations as the Jeannette Rankin Brigade while others became leaders of liberal "second wave" feminist movements.
 
Whether they committed to affiliating with groups that emphasized one issue over others or attempted to found groups with broad popular-front type agendas, Progressive women brought to their later work an understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in women's organizing. These women's stories demonstrate that the ultimate result of Cold War-era McCarthyism was not the defeat of women's activism, but rather its reconfiguration.
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College Women In The Nuclear Age
Cultural Literacy and Female Identity, 1940-1960
Babette Faehmel
Rutgers University Press, 2011

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s—the era of the so-called “feminine mystique”—were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. 

Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.

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The Color of Privilege
Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism
Aida Hurtado
University of Michigan Press, 1996
This groundbreaking and important book explores how women of different ethnic/racial groups conceive of feminism. Aída Hurtado advances the theory of relational privilege to explain those differing conceptions. Previous theories about feminism have predominantly emphasized the lives and experiences of middle-class white women. Aída Hurtado argues that the different responses to feminism by women of color are not so much the result of personality or cultural differences between white women and women of color, but of their differing relationship to white men.
For Hurtado, subordination and privilege must be conceived as relational in nature, and gender subordination and political solidarity must be examined in the framework of culture and socioeconomic context. Hurtado's analysis of gender oppression is written from an interdisciplinary, multicultural standpoint and is enriched by selections from poems by Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Elba Sanchez, and from plays by El Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers theater group.
A final chapter proposes that progressive scholarship, and especially feminist scholarship, must have at its core a reflexive theory of gender oppression that allows writers to simultaneously document oppression while taking into account the writer's own privilege, to analyze the observed as well as the observer.
Aída Hurtado is Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Color of Violence
The INCITE! Anthology
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, editor
Duke University Press, 2016
The editors and contributors to Color of Violence ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, Color of Violence radically repositions the antiviolence movement by putting women of color at its center. The contributors shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault and map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. The volume's thirty pieces—which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections—cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war. At a time of heightened state surveillance and repression of people of color, Color of Violence is an essential intervention.
 
Contributors. Dena Al-Adeeb, Patricia Allard, Lina Baroudi, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Sarah Deer, Eman Desouky, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, Dana Erekat, Nirmala Erevelles, Sylvanna Falcón, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Emi Koyama, Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, maina minahal, Nadine Naber, Stormy Ogden, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Beth Richie, Andrea J. Ritchie, Dorothy Roberts, Loretta J. Ross, s.r., Puneet Kaur Chawla Sahota, Renee Saucedo, Sista II Sista, Aishah Simmons, Andrea Smith, Neferti Tadiar, TransJustice, Haunani-Kay Trask, Traci C. West, Janelle White
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Composing Feminist Interventions
Activism, Engagement, Praxis
Kristine L. Blair
University Press of Colorado, 2018
This edited collection offers self-reflexive, critical accounts of how feminist writing studies scholars variously situated within rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies plan, implement, examine, and represent community-based inquiry and pedagogy. Readers will gain insight into the hows and whys involved with this important disciplinary work. Sharing a commitment to social change, the twenty-one chapter discussions and five course designs complicate and continue to evolve possibilities for how we conceptualize writing research and teaching as deeply collaborative, inclusive, and reciprocal practices.
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Confidence Culture
Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill
Duke University Press, 2022
In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.
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Constance Pascal (1877–1937)
Authority, Femininity and Feminism in French Psychiatry
Felicia Gordon
University of London Press, 2014
Constance Pascal’s career in French psychiatry from 1908 to 1937 exemplifies the opportunities open to women in the French Third Republic as well as the prejudices they encountered. As the first woman psychiatrist in France, Pascal, of Romanian origin, attained professional success at the cost of suppressing her personal life. Best known for her work on dementia praecox, she founded one of the first schools in France for children with severe learning difficulties, and made remarkable contributions in the reform of asylum practices and, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, in psychotherapeutic intervention. Her feminism is demonstrated by her distinguished, often contentious, career in a hitherto all male profession and by her support for other women in their professional roles. Her unjustly neglected life story illuminates many of the conflicts experienced by women entering the professions during the belle époque and the inter-war years. The study’s scholarly authority and ambitious theoretical range do not detract from its lively sense of the person and life struggles of the subject making this a fine demonstration of life history research enthralling for the general reader and expert alike.
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Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance
Christina N. Baker
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Christina N. Baker’s Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a “womanist artistic standpoint” theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees—and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers—Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.
 
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Contested Terrain
Reflections with Afghan Women Leaders
Sally L Kitch
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sally L. Kitch explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women’s lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. Kitch's compelling narrative follows the stories of Judge Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani from 2005 through 2013, providing an oft-ignored perspective on the personal and professional lives of Afghanistan's women. Contending with the complex dynamics of a society both undergoing and resisting change, Basel and Afghani speak candidly--and critically--of matters like international intervention and patriarchal Afghan culture, capturing the ways in which immense possibility alternates and vies with utter hopelessness. Strongly rooted in feminist theory and interdisciplinary historical and geopolitical analysis, Contested Terrain sheds new light on the struggle against the powerful forces that affect Afghan women's education, health, political participation, livelihoods, and quality of life. The book also suggests how a new dialogue might be started--in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.
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Contesting Publics
Feminism, Activism, Ethnography
Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole
Pluto Press, 2014

Through ethnographic cases and activists’ narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. The book re-examines the relationship between public and private and speaks to a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?

Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.

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The Costa Rican Women's Movement
A Reader
Ilse Abshagen Leitinger
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

This reader reflects the  genesis, scope, and direction of women’s activism in a single Latin American country.  It collects the voices of forty-one diverse women who live in Costa Rica, some radical, others strongly conservative, and most ranging inbetween, as they write about their lives, their problems, their aspirations.

Unlike the comparative studies of women’s issues that look at several different countries, the reader provides an insider’s view of one small, but quintessentially Latin American, society.  These women write of their own experience in organizing and working for change within the Costa Rican community.  Some represent groups fitting into traditional “women’s movement” that wants to improve certain aspects of women’s  and families’ daily lives.  Still others, the “feminists,” argue forcefully that true improvement requires a profound change of power relations in society, of women’s access to power and decision making.

The articles are organized into thematic groups that range from the definitions of Feminism in Costa Rica to women in Costa Rican  history, women’s legal equality, discrimination against women, and the status of Women’s Studies.  The brief biographies that identify each author underscore the leadership of Costa Rican women in  Latin American Feminism.  The founders and editors of Mujer, one of the most influential Feminist journals in Latin America, are among the authors represented in the reader.

The audience for this book will include specialists interested in Latin America, in women in Latin America, and in the international women’s movement.

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Cracking Up
Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States
Katelyn Hale Wood
University of Iowa Press, 2021
Cracking Up archives and analyzes Black feminist stand-up comedy in the United States over the past sixty years. Looking closely at the work of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Mo’Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, Phoebe Robinson, Jessica Williams, Amanda Seales, and Michelle Buteau, this book shows how Black feminist comedy and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest.

Katelyn Hale Wood interprets these artists not as tokens in a white, male-dominated field, but as part of a continuous history of Black feminist performance and presence. Broadly, Cracking Up frames stand-up comedy as an important platform from which to examine citizenship in the United States, articulate Black feminist political thought, and subvert structures of power. Wood also champions comedic performance and theatre history as imperative contexts for advancing historical studies of race, gender, and sexuality. From the comedy routines popular on Black vaudeville circuits to stand-up on contemporary social media platforms, Cracking Up excavates an overlooked history of Black women who have made the art of joke-telling a key part of radical performance and political engagement.
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Creative Conformity
The Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'i Women
Elizabeth M. Bucar
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Much feminist scholarship has viewed Catholicism and Shi'i Islam as two religious traditions that, historically, have greeted feminist claims with skepticism or outright hostility. Creative Conformity demonstrates how certain liberal secular assumptions about these religious traditions are only partly correct and, more importantly, misleading. In this highly original study, Elizabeth Bucar compares the feminist politics of eleven US Catholic and Iranian Shi'i women and explores how these women contest and affirm clerical mandates in order to expand their roles within their religious communities and national politics.

Using scriptural analysis and personal interviews, Creative Conformity demonstrates how women contribute to the production of ethical knowledge within both religious communities in order to expand what counts as feminist action, and to explain how religious authority creates an unintended diversity of moral belief and action. Bucar finds that the practices of Catholic and Shi‘a women are not only determined by but also contribute to the ethical and political landscape in their respective religious communities. She challenges the orthodoxies of liberal feminist politics and, ultimately, strengthens feminism as a scholarly endeavor.

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Cross Currents in the International Women’s Movement, 1848–1948
Patricia Ward D'Itri
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

This study portrays individuals, organizations, and events that contributed to the development of the world movement for women's rights between 1848 and 1948.

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Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion
Ilya Parkins
University of New Hampshire Press, 2011
Grounded in the ubiquitous, ever-changing matter of fashion, Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion places women at the heart of modern culture. Rich and cohesive, this collection demonstrates how fashion shaped and emerged from diverse cultures of femininity and modernity. By recovering fashion as a dynamic and far-reaching force in culture and politics, the volume examines the nuanced and conflicted terrain of femininity from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Revealing the inextricability of fashion from modern life, the volume argues for placing gender, everyday life, and materiality at the forefront of our accounts of modernity.

This transatlantic and truly interdisciplinary collection, with an afterword by distinguished literary scholar Rita Felski, is also notable for its mix of established and emerging scholars. The contributors address diverse aspects of women's engagement with fashion in modernity, through such topics as Sapphic architecture, tea gowns, secondhand clothing, transnational identity, the coquette, nursing uniforms, and Harlem Renaissance photographs. Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion traces a unique and often surprising history of modernity and its entwinement with the gendered phenomenon of fashion.
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The Cunning of Gender Violence
Geopolitics and Feminism
Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect.

Contributors. Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Inderpal Grewal, Rema Hammami, Janet R. Jakobsen, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Vasuki Nesiah, Samira Shackle, Sima Shakhsari, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Dina M Siddiqi, Shahla Talebi, Leti Volpp, Rafia Zakaria
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Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn
Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century
Edited by Elana Levine
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Media expansion into the digital realm and the continuing segregation of users into niches has led to a proliferation of cultural products targeted to and consumed by women. Though often dismissed as frivolous or excessively emotional, feminized culture in reality offers compelling insights into the American experience of the early twenty-first century.

Elana Levine brings together writings from feminist critics that chart the current terrain of feminized pop cultural production. Analyzing everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to Pinterest to pregnancy apps, contributors examine the economic, technological, representational, and experiential dimensions of products and phenomena that speak to, and about, the feminine. As these essays show, the imperative of productivity currently permeating feminized pop culture has created a generation of texts that speak as much to women's roles as public and private workers as to an impulse for fantasy or escape.

Incisive and compelling, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn sheds new light on contemporary women's engagement with an array of media forms in the context of postfeminist culture and neoliberalism.

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