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522 books match the query 'Gender' and 13 start with e

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East is West and West is East

Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America

Karen Kuo

Temple University Press, 2012

Between 1919-1938, contact between Asia and America forced a reassessment of the normative boundaries of race, sex, gender, class, home, and nation. Karen Kuo’s provocative East Is West and West Is East looks closely at these global shifts to modernity.

In her analysis of five forgotten texts—the 1930 film East Is West, Frank Capra’s 1937 version of Lost Horizon and its 1973 remake, Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West, and Baroness Ishimoto’s memoir/manifesto, Facing Both Ways—Kuo elucidates how “Asia” played a role in shaping American gender and racial identities and how Asian authors understood modern America and its social, political, and cultural influence on Asia.

Kuo asserts that while notions of white and Asian racial difference remain salient, sexual and gendered constructions of Asians and whites were at times about similarity and intersections as much as they were about establishing differences.

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Economies of Gender

Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor

Julia H. Meszaros

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women's Labor offers a provocative exploration of the international dating industry, challenging simplistic narratives of human trafficking and scams while shedding light on the economic dynamics of gender. Through twelve years of fieldwork, the book delves into the motivations and experiences of men who seek relationships abroad, driven by dissatisfaction with Western women who, they believe, no longer embody traditional femininity. By examining romantic tourism hotspots such as Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines, Economies of Gender reveals how these international settings serve as "intimate frontiers," where men seek to extract femininity capital and bolster their status. It illuminates the often-unseen economic underpinnings of relationships and questions how global gender dynamics shape desires, fantasies, and intimate markets. Through its compelling analysis, the book broadens the conversation on gender, power, and the commodification of intimacy in a globalized world.

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Edna Ferber's Hollywood

American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History

By J. E. Smyth

University of Texas Press, 2009

Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era—among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences.

In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider—a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.

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Emerging Intersections

Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice

Dill, Bonnie Thornton

Rutgers University Press, 2009

The United States is known as a "melting pot" yet this mix tends to be volatile and contributes to a long history of oppression, racism, and bigotry.

Emerging Intersections, an anthology of ten previously unpublished essays, looks at the problems of inequality and oppression from new angles and promotes intersectionality as an interpretive tool that can be utilized to better understand the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference shape our lives today. The book showcases innovative contributions that expand our understanding of how inequality affects people of color, demonstrates the ways public policies reinforce existing systems of inequality, and shows how research and teaching using an intersectional perspective compels scholars to become agents of change within institutions. By offering practical applications for using intersectional knowledge, Emerging Intersections will help bring us one step closer to achieving positive institutional change and social justice.

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Emotional Landscapes

Love, Gender, and Migration

Edited by Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Love and its attendant emotions not only spur migration—they forge our response to the people who leave their homes in search of new lives. Emotional Landscapes looks at the power of love, and the words we use to express it, to explore the immigration experience. The authors focus on intimate emotional language and how languages of love shape the ways human beings migrate but also create meaning for migrants, their families, and their societies. Looking at sources ranging from letters of Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s to tweets passed among immigrant families in today's Italy, the essays explore the sentimental, sexual, and political meanings of love. The authors also look at how immigrants and those around them use love to justify separation and loss, and how love influences us to privilege certain immigrants—wives, children, lovers, refugees—over others.

Affecting and perceptive, Emotional Landscapes moves from war and transnational families to gender and citizenship to explore the crossroads of migration and the history of emotion.

Contributors: María Bjerg, Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, Tyler Carrington, Margarita Dounia, Alexander Freund, Donna R. Gabaccia, A. James Hammerton, Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, Emily Pope-Obeda, Linda Reeder, Roberta Ricucci, Suzanne M. Sinke, and Elizabeth Zanoni

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Empire and Gender in LXX Esther

Meredith J. Stone

SBL Press, 2018

A new perspective on essential aspects of Esther’s plot and characters for students and scholars

Empire and Gender in LXX Esther foregrounds and highlights empire as the central lens in this provocative new reading of Esther. This book provides a unique synchronic reading of LXX Esther with the Additions, allowing the presence and negotiation of imperial power to be further illuminated throughout the story’s plot. Stone explores and demonstrates how performances of gender are inextricably intertwined with the exertion and negotiation of imperial power portrayed in LXX Esther and offers examples of connections to the range of imperial power experienced by Jewish people during the late Second Temple period.

Features:

An exploration of the tenets and methodology of imperial-critical approaches
Focused attention to the final form of LXX Esther
Construction of early audiences for LXX Esther in first-century BCE Ptolemaic Alexandria and Hasmonean Judea

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Enraptured Space

Gender, Class, and Ecology in the Work of Paula Meehan

Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick

West Virginia University Press, 2025

In the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets emerges as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond. Drawing on her own lived experience as a practicing poet, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick explores how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. With chapters of literary analysis swimming in a conversation between two poets, this book breaches the boundaries between criticism and memoir, suggesting ways that every scholar is transformed by the subjects they study.

In Paula Meehan, Kirkpatrick has found a powerful poet to both study and love, and her reading of Meehan’s poetry and prose through the lenses of gender studies, the environmental humanities, and social class offers a passionate endorsement of Meehan’s radical interventions in the canon of Irish poetry. This work explores eight volumes of Meehan’s poetry, including Dharmakaya, Painting Rain, and Geomantic.

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Entering the Fray

Gender, Politics, and Culture in the New South

Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells & Sheila R. Phipps

University of Missouri Press, 2009

The study of the New South has in recent decades been greatly enriched by research into gender, reshaping our understanding of the struggle for woman suffrage, the conflicted nature of race and class in the South, the complex story of politics, and the role of family and motherhood in black and white society. This book brings together nine essays that examine the importance of gender, race, and culture in the New South, offering a rich and varied analysis of the multifaceted role of gender in the lives of black and white southerners in the troubled decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ranging widely from conservative activism by white women in 1920s Georgia to political involvement by black women in 1950s Memphis, many of these essays focus on southern women’s increasing public activities and high-profile images in the twentieth century. They tell how women shouldered responsibilities for local, national, and international interests; but just as nineteenth-century women’s status could be at risk from too much public presence, women of the New South stepped gingerly into the public arena, taking care to work within what they considered their current gender limitations.

The authors—both established and up-and-coming scholars—take on subjects that reflect wide-ranging, sophisticated, and diverse scholarship on black and white women in the New South. They include the efforts of female Home Demonstration Agents to defeat debilitating diseases in rural Florida and the increasing participation of women in historic preservation at Monticello. They also reflect unique personal stories as diverse as lobbyist Kathryn Dunaway’s efforts to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in Georgia and Susan Smith’s depiction by the national media as a racist southerner during coverage of her children’s deaths.

Taken together, these nine essays contribute to the picture of women increasing their movement into political and economic life while all too often still maintaining their gendered place as determined by society. Their rich insights provide new ways to consider the meaning and role of gender in the post–Civil War South.

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Environmentalism in Popular Culture

Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural

Noël Sturgeon

University of Arizona Press, 2009

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species?

Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.”

The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

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Equivocal Beings

Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s--Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen

Claudia L. Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions.

Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

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Evangelical News

Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s

Anja-Maria Bassimir

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A comprehensive study of evangelical magazine discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and how it navigated and sustained religious convictions in a time of dramatic social change

The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in US history. In tandem with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, abortion, birth control, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a surge in readership for evangelical periodicals such as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners as well as the feminist newsletter Daughters of Sarah.

While each of these magazines—and other publications and media—contributed to and participated in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they also had their own outlooks and political leanings concerning hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, Anja-Maria Bassimir presents a nuanced view of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century through the lens of the movement’s own media.

Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. To accomplish this, Evangelical News traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters investigate such topics as how evangelicals reenvisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement, the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence, and the place of evangelicals as political actors.

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Everyday Revolutionaries

Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Irina Carlota Silber

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Winner of the 2013 International Latino Book Awards in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category

Everyday Revolutionaries provides a longitudinal and rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. By exploring political processes in one of El Salvador's former war zones-a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation-Irina Carlota Silber offers a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.

Silber provides one of the first rubrics for understanding and contextualizing postwar disillusionment, drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork and research on immigration to the United States by former insurgents. With an eye for gendered experiences, she unmasks how community members are asked, contradictorily and in different contexts, to relinquish their identities as "revolutionaries" and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same "participation" that fueled their revolutionary action. Beautifully written and offering rich stories of hope and despair, Everyday Revolutionaries contributes to important debates in public anthropology and the ethics of engaged research practices.

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