Results by title

A clarion call for a new approach to feminist thought

In this major work, Carolyn Dever considers the ambivalence or outright hostility many feminists feel toward theory, arguing that a fundamental skepticism toward abstraction has been vital to the development of the movement.

A rejuvenating look at sleep’s integral role in feminist practice, critique, and imagination

Inequality is notoriously exhausting to confront, but through theater, performance art, and theory, feminist artists and thinkers have explored a radical counter to this exhaustion: sleep. Centering creative work on this restorative practice, Sleep with Spectators is a refreshing and visionary counterhistory of feminism that offers sleep as a tool for imagining new ways of living—ones that prioritize not only rest but also care and interdependence.

Taking performance as a unique means of perceiving private and unconscious aspects of daily life, Danielle Drees draws from opera, plays, and avant-garde theater to find instances of sleep and sleeplessness as novel embodiments of core feminist concerns. Among her subjects are Sarah Kane’s free verse text 4.48 Psychosis; María Irene Fornés’s queer drama of racial–sexual transformation, Enter THE NIGHT; and Regina José Galindo’s America’s Family Prison, in which Galindo, her partner, and their baby spent twenty-four hours in a “family-sized” cell rented from a private prison outfitter. Adeptly engaging this fascinating collection of international archival material through the lenses of Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and disability studies, Sleep with Spectators illuminates how sleep performances reveal and critique inequalities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability.

Idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary, Sleep with Spectators charts an original path through the feminist performance archive, presenting new ways of indexing injustice and interrogating the political conditions of rest.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Few figures in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provoke such visceral responses as Sonia Johnson. Her unrelenting public support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) made her the face of LDS feminism while her subsequent excommunication roiled the faith community.

Christine Talbot tells the story of Sonia’s historic confrontation with the Church within the context of the faith’s first large-scale engagement with the feminist movement. A typical if well-educated Latter-day Saints homemaker, Sonia was moved to action by the all-male LDS leadership’s opposition to the ERA and a belief the Church should stay out of politics. Talbot uses the activist’s experiences and criticisms to explore the ways Sonia’s ideas and situation sparked critical questions about LDS thought, culture, and belief. She also illuminates how Sonia’s excommunication shaped LDS feminism, the Church’s antagonism to feminist critiques, and the Church itself in the years to come.

A revealing and long-overdue account, Sonia Johnson explores the life, work, and impact of the LDS feminist.

A rethinking of realism that reveals its relevance to sexual and cultural politics.

Despite rumors of its demise in literary theory and practice, realism persists. Why this is, and how realism is relevant to current interdisciplinary debates in gender studies and cultural studies, are the questions underlying Spectacles of Realism. With particular reference to nineteenth-century French culture, the contributors explore the role realism has played in the social construction of gender and sexuality. Among their subjects are nineteenth-century physiologies, photographs, caricatures, and Balzac’s Comédie humaine; the ethnographic claims of Goncourt’s naturalism and the historical claims of Zola’s; and the allure of exotica displayed at new museums and international expositions.

Sarah E. Whitney explores the genre's challenge to postfeminist assumptions of women's equality and empowerment. The authors she examines--Patricia Cornwell, Jodi Picoult, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, and Alice Sebold--construct narratives around socially invisible and physically broken protagonists who directly experience consequences of women's ongoing disempowerment. Their works ask readers to inhabit women's suffering and to face the uncomfortable, all-too-denied fact that today's women must navigate lives fraught with risk. Whitney's analysis places the authors within a female gothic tradition that has long given voice to women's fears of their own powerlessness. But she also reveals the paradox that allows the genre to powerfully critique postfeminism's often sunshiney outlook while uneasily coexisting within the same universe.

From militant suffragette at the beginning of the twentieth century to campaigner against colonialism in Africa after the Second World War, Sylvia Pankhurst dedicated her life to fighting oppression and injustice.

In this vivid biography Katherine Connelly examines Pankhurst’s role at the forefront of significant developments in the history of radical politics. She guides us through Pankhurst's construction of a suffragette militancy which put working-class women at the heart of the struggle, her championing of the Bolshevik Revolution and her clandestine attempts to sabotage the actions of the British state, as well as her early identification of the dangers of Fascism.

The book explores the dilemmas, debates and often painful personal consequences faced by Pankhurst which were played out in her art, writings and activism. It argues that far from being an advocate of disparate causes, Pankhurst’s campaigns were united by an essential continuity which hold vital lessons for achieving social change. This lively and accessible biography presents Pankhurst as a courageous and inspiring campaigner, of huge relevance to those engaged in social movements today.