Leslie Heywood
University of Minnesota Press, 1997
Discusses the challenges and pleasures of creating a new feminism.
Young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images-in the distance from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, a chasm has been traversed and an entire history made. In Third Wave Agenda, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter now, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past and in planning for the challenges of the future.
The women and men writing here are activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists, and journalists. They distinguish themselves from a group of young, conservative feminists, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who criticize second wave feminists and are regularly called on to speak for the “next generation” of feminism. In contrast, Third Wave Agenda seeks to complicate our understanding of feminism by not only embracing the second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures, but also emphasizing ways that desires and pleasures such as beauty and power can be used to enliven activist work, even while recognizing the importance of maintaining a critique of them.Combining research, theory, and social practice with an autobiographical style, these writers are hard at work creating a new feminism that draws on the submerged histories of other feminisms-black feminism, “womanism,” and working-class feminism, among others. Some topics explored in Third Wave Agenda include feminism in popular music, interracial coalitions, and tensions between individual ambitions and collective action. Contributors: Barry Baldridge, Ana Marie Cox, Ophira Edut, Tali Edut, Carol Guess, Freya Johnson, Melissa Klein, Dyann Logwood, Annalee Newitz, Jeff Niesel, Jennifer Reed, Jillian Sandel, Leigh Shoemaker, Michelle Sidler, Deborah L. Siegel, Jen Smith, Carolyn Sorisio, and Lidia Yukman.
Linda Heidenreich
University of North Texas Press, 2014
Elizabeth Grosz
Duke University Press, 2005
Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.
Edited by Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande
Pluto Press, 2019
Irmgard Emmelhainz
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

Julietta Hua
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
The history of human beings bought and sold, forced into lives of abject servitude or sexual slavery, is a story as old as civilization and yet still of global concern today. How this story is told, Julietta Hua argues, says much about our cultural beliefs. Through a critical inquiry into representations of human trafficking, she reveals the political, social, and cultural strains underlying our current preoccupation with this issue and the difficulty of framing human rights in universal terms.
In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights, Hua maps the ways in which government, media, and scholarship have described sex trafficking for U.S. consumption. As her investigation takes us from laws like the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act to political speeches and literary and media images, it uncovers dark assumptions about race, difference, and the United States’ place in the world expressed—and often promoted—by such images. The framing itself, exploiting dichotomies of victim/agent, rescued/rescuer, trafficked/smuggled, illustrates the limits of universalism in addressing human rights.
Uniquely broad in scope, this work considers the laws of human trafficking in conjunction with popular culture. In doing so, it constructively draws attention to the ways in which notions of racialized sexualities form our ideas about national belonging, global citizenship, and, ultimately, human rights.
David M. Robinson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
Journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate, Margaret Fuller was America’s first major female intellectual. Throughout much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, however, critics and scholars largely saw her as a minor figure in the transcendentalist movement with which she is associated, and her work was considered secondary to that of male figures like Emerson and Hawthorne. While her biography—including her marriage to an Italian noble and her dramatic death in a shipwreck—was often the focus, her skill as a writer was generally overlooked, and her intellectual development largely ignored.
In the early 1980s, David M. Robinson was one of the first scholars to publish an article that focused on Fuller’s mind and art. Now Transcendent Woman completes and extends this early work. Outlining the development of her philosophy, which Robinson defines as a “purpose-oriented form of thinking, tailored to the commitment and assets of each individual,” he traces Fuller’s intellectual journey, first in relation to her family and the people around her in New England and later in her travels in the midwestern United States and, more importantly, through Europe and her residency in Italy. He focuses first and foremost on what Fuller was reading (Goethe was key), what she was thinking as revealed in her letters and journals, and what she was writing, including seminal works such as Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as lesser-known essays, translations, and short stories. Drawing extensively on primary sources, Robinson charts Fuller’s development and achievement as an original thinker and fearless advocate of democracy.
Finn Enke
Temple University Press, 2012
Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in Transgender Nonfiction, 2013
If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning.
Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies.
Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.
Winfred Woodhull
University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Through readings of some of the best-known texts in Algerian literature in French, Woodhull both challenges the separation between French and Francophone literatures and cultures in the academy and explores the ways in which "femininity" has been represented in the texts of North African and French writers since the mid-1950s.
Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk
Duke University Press, 2004
A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself—the sights, the sounds, and the smells—as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.
Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Brigitte Young
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Léonora Miano
Seagull Books, 2023
Léonora Miano
Seagull Books, 2022