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This volume brings together for the first time all the writings of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill on equality between the sexes, including John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, a classic in the history of the women's rights movement since its publication one hundred years ago.

Also contained in this volume is a major interpretative essay by Alice S. Rossi on Mill and Harriet Taylor which describes and analyzes their long personal and intellectual relationship.

The biblical accounts of Eve's life are central to Western culture, occupying a privileged place in our literature and art, culture, and society. For both Judaism and Christianity, these stories involving Eve have for centuries been entangled with the religious and social construction of gender. The ambiguous biblical record of her life from the two versions of her creation, through her encounter with the forbidden fruit, to her expulsion from Eden, and followed by the tantalizing glimpses of her life in the real world has served through the ages as a mirror of commonly held views about women. For Jewish readers, Eve's role as metonym -- signifying womanhood, or Jewish womanhood, as a whole -- is of prime importance. By tracing the imagined character of Eve from ancient times to the present, Eternally Eve opens a window on the transmission and persistence of cultural and social values. Eternally Eve takes as its subject the many ways these stories can be read, interpreting the biblical narratives as well as their iteration by rabbinic midrashists and modern poets. Anne Lapidus Lerner argues that we must set aside, or at least rethink, a series of assumptions about Eve that have been dominant in Jewish thought for centuries and instead return to the original texts to rediscover meanings implicit in them. Using modern poetry about Eve as a touchstone for reinterpreting older texts, Lerner discovers that Genesis is often more open to contemporary values than are later rabbinic texts. Linking sacred texts to works of the classical and modern imagination, Lerner restores to her sources meanings suppressed or neglected over many years and demonstrates their power to speak today.

In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century.

Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present.

In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence.

Kirin Narayan’s imagination was captured the very first time that, as a girl visiting the Himalayas, she heard Kangra women join their voices together in song. Returning as an anthropologist, she became fascinated by how they spoke of singing as a form of enrichment, bringing feelings of accomplishment, companionship, happiness, and even good health—all benefits of the “everyday creativity” she explores in this book. Part ethnography, part musical discovery, part poetry, part memoir, and part unforgettable portraits of creative individuals, this unique work brings this remote region in North India alive in sight and sound while celebrating the incredible powers of music in our lives.
          
With rare and captivating eloquence, Narayan portrays Kangra songs about difficulties on the lives of goddesses and female saints as a path to well-being. Like the intricate geometries of mandalu patterns drawn in courtyards or the subtle balance of flavors in a meal, well-crafted songs offer a variety of deeply meaningful benefits: as a way of making something of value, as a means of establishing a community of shared pleasure and skill, as a path through hardships and limitations, and as an arena of renewed possibility. Everyday Creativity makes big the small world of Kangra song and opens up new ways of thinking about what creativity is to us and why we are so compelled to engage it.

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.

Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.

With insightful essays—some newly written for this collection—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present.

"An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."—Lesley Gill, News Politics

"[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."—Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement

"In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred,' have distorted American popular debate and social life."—Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement

"At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."—Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review

“Expecting Teryk is a rich and sumptuous work that speaks to the deeper realities and represents a unique viewpoint of experiences shared by all individuals who choose the path to parenthood.”—Disability, Pregnancy, and Parenthood

The period just prior to the birth of a child is a time of profound personal transformation for expectant parents. Expecting Teryk: An Exceptional Path to Parenthood is an intimate exploration, written in the form of a letter from a parent to her future son, that reclaims a rite of passage that modern society would strip of its magic.

Dawn Prince-Hughes, renowned author of Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism, considers the ways being autistic might inform her parenting. She also candidly narrates her experience of becoming a parent as part of a lesbian couple—from meeting her partner to the questions they ask about their readiness to become parents and the practical considerations of choosing a sperm donor.

Expecting Teryk is viewed through the lens of autism as Prince-Hughes shares the unique way she sees and experiences the world—as well as her aching will to be fully present for her son. Contemplating the evolutionary traditions of parenting from both animal and human perspectives and the reassurances that nature offers, Expecting Teryk is a work of sensuous wonder that speaks to the deeper realities and archetypal experiences shared by all who embark on the journey of parenthood.

During the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the censorious attitude that characterized China's post-1989 official response to contemporary art gave way to a new market-driven, culture industry valuation of art. Experimental artists who once struggled against state regulation of artistic expression found themselves being courted to advance China's international image. In Experimental Beijing Sasha Su-Ling Welland examines the interlocking power dynamics in this transformational moment and rapid rise of Chinese contemporary art into a global phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and experience as a videographer and curator, Welland analyzes encounters between artists, curators, officials, and urban planners as they negotiated the social role of art and built new cultural institutions. Focusing on the contradictions and exclusions that emerged, Welland traces the complex gender politics involved and shows that feminist forms of art practice hold the potential to reshape consciousness, produce a nonnormative history of Chinese contemporary art, and imagine other, more just worlds.

From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and characters, so too does Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire—none of whom identify as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for decolonizing queer studies.