207 books match the query 'Feminist theory' and 10 start with r

cover of Radicals in the Heartland: The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois

Radicals in the Heartland

The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois

Michael V. Metz

University of Illinois Press, 2019

In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois. Out-of-town radicals preached armed revolution. Students took to the streets and fought police and National Guardsmen. Firebombs were planted in lecture halls while explosions rocked a federal building on one side of town and a recruiting office on the other. Across the state, the powers-that-be expressed shock that such events could take place at Illinois's esteemed, conservative, flagship university—how could it happen here, of all places?

Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

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cover of Really Fake

Really Fake

Alexandra Juhasz

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

More important than flagging things “really fake” is to understand why they are dismissed as fake

The new truth is the one that circulates: digital truth emerges from lists, databases, archives, and conditions of storage. Multiple truths may be activated through search, link, and retrieve queries. Alexandra Juhasz, Ganaele Langlois, and Nishant Shah respond by taking up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing. Their feminist digital methods allow considerations of internet things through alternative networked internet time: slowing down to see, honor, and engage with our past; invoking indeterminacy as a human capacity that lets multiple truths commingle on a page or in a body; and saving the truths of ourselves and our others differently from the corporate internet’s perpetual viral movement.

Writing across their own shared truisms, actors, and touchstones, the authors propose creative tactics, theoretical overtures, and experimental escape routes built to a human scale as ways to regain our capacities to know and tell truths about ourselves.
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cover of Remaindered Life

Remaindered Life

Neferti X. Tadiar

Duke University Press, 2022

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.
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cover of Rethinking Sexual Harrassment

Rethinking Sexual Harrassment

Clare Brant

Pluto Press, 1994

'An innovative and challenging title from feminists in Britain [...] makes a valuable contribution to understanding sexual harassment' Feminist Bookstore News

'Serious and scholarly ... deserves a wide audience' Journal of the Institute of Health Education

'Excellent ... However familiar the subject may seem - or precisely because we all think we know what term 'sexual harassment' means - these discussions open up a series of vital questions, both theoretical and practical. Rethinking Sexual Harassment is a valuable contribution to a debate that continues all around us' Parallax

Sexual harassment continues to stimulate controversy and attract partisan responses. This is an exciting and original exploration of how it came to be defined, what institutional forces and contexts shape our understanding of it. This multidisciplinary study brings together essays from feminist scholars in the fields of law, literature, the social sciences, history and cultural studies.

The contributors' central argument is an awareness of the social and discursive contexts required to challenge sexual harassment effectively. Offering insight into current limitations and making practical suggestions for ways forward, this wide-ranging collection addresses general readers and professionals alike.

Contributors include Suzanne Gibson; Helen Watson; Gargi Bhattacharyya; Ruth Jamieson; Celia Kitzinger; Suzanne Raitt; Ros Hunt; Diane Purkiss; Padma Anagol-McGinn and Jane Beckett
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cover of Rhetorics of Motherhood

Rhetorics of Motherhood

Lindal Buchanan

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Becoming a mother profoundly alters one’s perception of the world, as Lindal Buchanan learned firsthand when she gave birth. Suddenly attentive to representations of mothers and mothering in advertisements, fiction, film, art, education, and politics, she became intrigued by the persuasive force of the concept of motherhood, an interest that unleashed a host of questions: How is the construct defined? How are maternal appeals crafted, presented, and performed? What do they communicate about gender and power? How do they affect women? Her quest for answers has produced Rhetorics of Motherhood, the first book-length consideration of the topic through a feminist rhetorical lens.

 Although both male and female rhetors employ motherhood to promote themselves and their agendas, Buchanan argues it is particularly slippery terrain for women—on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of Motherhood investigates that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and performance of the Mother in American public discourse, tracing its use and impact in three case studies, and by theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourses work to women’s benefit or detriment. In the process, the reader encounters a fascinating array of issues—including birth control, civil rights, and abortion—and rhetors, ranging from Diane Nash and Margaret Sanger to Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama.

As Buchanan makes clear, motherhood is a rich site for investigating the interrelationships among gender, power, and public discourse. Her latest book contributes to the discipline of rhetoric by attending to and making a convincing case for the significance of this understudied subject. With its examination of timely controversies, contemporary and historical figures, and powerful women, Rhetorics of Motherhood will appeal to a wide array of readers in rhetoric, communications, American studies, women’s studies, and beyond.

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cover of Riding

Riding

Pardis Mahdavi

Duke University Press, 2025

In Riding, Pardis Mahdavi meditates on the lessons learned over a lifetime of horseback riding and the falling, failing, and joy it brings. At once a history of Caspian horses, an exploration of Mahdavi’s Iranian-American identity and family history, and a consideration of the capacity for self-reflection and self-compassion through human-animal relationships, Riding offers a roadmap for learning to live in harmony with the self and the environment around us. Mahdavi shows how her relationship with horses gives her insights into intergenerational strength and tools for healing intergenerational trauma. Riding from the mountains of Iran to the beaches of California, Mahdavi shares her love affair with horses, rediscovers a homeland she longs for, and ultimately finds her strength.
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cover of Rising Up, Living On: Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks

Rising Up, Living On

Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks

Catherine E. Walsh

Duke University Press, 2023

In Rising Up, Living On, Catherine E. Walsh examines struggles for existence in societies deeply marked by the systemic violences and entwinements of coloniality, capitalism, Christianity, racism, gendering, heteropatriarchy, and the continual dispossession of bodies, land, knowledge, and life, while revealing practices that contest and live in the cracks of these matrices of power. Through stories, narrations, personal letters, conversations, lived accounts, and weaving together the thought of many—including ancestors, artists, students, activists, feminists, collectives, and Indigenous and Africana peoples—in the Americas, the Global South, and beyond, Walsh takes readers on a journey of decolonial praxis. Here, Walsh outlines individual and collective paths that cry out and crack, ask and walk, deschool, undo the nation-state, and break down boundaries of gender, race, and nature. Rising Up, Living On is a book that sows re-existences, nurtures relationality, and cultivates the sense, hope, and possibility of life otherwise in these desperate times.
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cover of Rooms of Our Own

Rooms of Our Own

Susan Gubar

University of Illinois Press, 2006

With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor.

A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several decades: the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. Yet Rooms of Our Own eschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.

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cover of Running

Running

Lindsey A. Freeman

Duke University Press, 2023

In Running, former NCAA Division I track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents the feminist and queer handbook of running that she always wanted but could never find. For Freeman, running is full of joy, desire, and indulgence in the pleasure and weirdness of having a body. It allows for a space of freedom—to move and be moved. Through tender storytelling of a lifetime wearing running shoes, Freeman considers injury and recovery, what it means to run as a visibly queer person, and how the release found in running comes from a desire to touch something that cannot be accessed when still. Running invites us to run through life, legging it out the best we can with heart and style.
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cover of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legacy of Dissent: Feminist Rhetoric and the Law

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Legacy of Dissent

Feminist Rhetoric and the Law

Katie L. Gibson

University of Alabama Press, 2018

A rhetorical analysis of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s feminist jurisprudence.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lifelong effort to reshape the language of American law has had profound consequences: she has shifted the rhetorical boundaries of jurisprudence on a wide range of fundamental issues from equal protection to reproductive rights. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ginsburg led a consequential attack on sexist law in the United States. By directly confronting the patriarchal voice of the law, she pointedly challenged an entrenched genre of legal language that silenced the voices and experiences of American women and undermined their status as equal citizens. On the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg continues to challenge the traditional scripts of legal discourse to insist on a progressive vision of the Constitution and to demand a more inclusive and democratic body of law.

This illuminating work examines Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s contributions in reshaping the rhetoric of the law (specifically through the lens of watershed cases in women’s rights) and describes her rhetorical contributions—beginning with her work in the 1970s as a lawyer and an advocate for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project through her tenure as a Supreme Court justice. Katie L. Gibson examines Ginsburg’s rhetoric to argue that she has dramatically shifted the boundaries of legal language. Gibson draws from rhetorical theory, critical legal theory, and feminist theory to describe the law as a rhetorical genre, arguing that Ginsburg’s jurisprudence can appropriately be understood as a direct challenge to the traditional rhetoric of the law.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg stands as an incredibly important figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminism. While a growing number of admirers celebrate Justice Ginsburg’s voice of dissent today, Ginsburg’s rhetorical legacy reveals that she has long articulated a sharp and strategic voice of judicial dissent. This study contributes to a more complete understanding of her feminist legacy by detailing the unique contributions of her legal rhetoric.

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