Laiza- Sometimes the End is Only a Beginning

(Notionpress, 2016)

By Kudrat Dutta Chaudhary

In the summer of 2015, an earthquake that strikes Nepal causes destruction and the entire Nepali community perishes in the catastrophe.

Nineteen-year-old Laiza's parents die in the disaster and she and her younger brother, Ratan are forced to move to Kathmandu with their uncle. The struggle to find resources and the strained relationship between Laiza and her aunt forces her to move to India. Once she reaches there Laiza stays with her aunt's cousin, Rohit, as she looks for a better future and is subsequently hired as a lady's maid by a high profile household that holds a dark secret. She soon finds herself trapped in a world she never imagined. While tackling with the sorrow of her past and present, Laiza finds friends where she least expects them- in the company of a Manipuri and a Ukrainian girl along with an Indian Army soldier of the Gorkha Regiment, whose father went missing in the Earthquake.

Follow Laiza on her journey as a young woman who overcomes grief and learns to hold on to hope in the face of tragedy.

Abortion Regret: The New Attack on Reproductive Freedom

(Praeger, 2019)

By J. Shoshanna Ehrlich and Alesha E. Doan

An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and activists concerned about current attacks on abortion rights, this book offers an unmatched account of the emergence, consolidation, and consequences of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic abortion regret narrative.

• Examines the historical continuity of the abortion regret narrative as a political strategy used to limit women's access to abortion

• Asserts that the abortion regret narrative is intimately tied to a gendered and paternalistic construction of women's divine role as mothers

• Examines the antiabortion movement's strategy to place the "grieving" mother at the center of its oppositional narrative

• Uses interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and content analysis of state antiabortion policies to trace the growing impact of the abortion regret narrative

• Examines and reveals the antiabortion movement's calculated political motivation for using the abortion regret narrative as its primary strategy to oppose abortion rights

Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions

(W. W. Norton & Company, 2014)

By Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree

A lively exploration of current questions of gender and their application to students today.

Wade and Ferree’s first edition textbook is a lively introduction to the sociology of gender. Probing questions, the same ones that students often bring to the course, frame readable chapters that are packed with the most up-to-date scholarship available―in language students will understand. The authors use memorable examples mined from pop culture, history, psychology, biology, and everyday life to truly engage students in the study of gender and spark interest in sociological perspectives.

Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations

(Vanderbilt University Press, 2019)

Edited By Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan

Body Battlegrounds explores the rich and complex lives of society's body outlaws—individuals from myriad social locations who oppose hegemonic norms, customs, and conventions about the body. Original research chapters (based on textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation) along with personal narratives provide a window into the everyday lives of people rewriting the norms of embodiment in sites like schools, sporting events, and doctors' offices.

An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

(SUNY Press, 2019)

By Jennifer Cazenave

Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary.

Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann’s twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.

Moxie and a Good Sense of Balance: Nancy Drew and the Power of the Teenage Girl

(Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)

By Lynne Byall Benson

The literary character of Nancy Drew, created by the Stratemeyer publishing syndicate in the 1930s, has endured for more than eighty years. Successfully solving complicated mysteries, Nancy Drew offered girls the role model of a confident, independent young woman, functioning simultaneously within what was considered appropriate within the sphere of her gender and outside of that sphere in terms of her so-called moxie. Nancy Drew’s portrayal in the books has changed over the years, reflecting changing social norms, becoming a more obedient and less independent in the 1940s as women returned to traditional roles after World War II. Surprisingly, the Nancy Drew of the 1970s and 1980s did not reflect the changes brought about by the women’s movement and instead was transformed into a glamorous, globe-trotting professional private investigator in The Nancy Drew Files. The publishers soon came to their senses and brought back the plucky Nancy of old. In addition to analyzing Nancy Drew as a proto-feminist role model, Lynne Byall Benson provides a comprehensive bibliography of sources that can be used by scholars and teachers.

Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing

(Fordham University Press, 2019)

By Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall

When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when they were young, competitive gymnasts, they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep and diverse archive of self-representational forms―slave narratives, testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books―Gilmore and Marshall attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures that link a range of texts and forms from the mid–nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Gilmore and Marshall offer a genealogy of the reverberations across timelines, self-representational acts, and jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. Reconstructing these historical and theoretical trajectories restores an intersectional testimonial history of writing by women of color about sexual and racist violence to the center of life writing and, in so doing, furthers our capacity to engage ethically with representations of vulnerability, childhood, and collective witness.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice

(Routledge, 2019)

Edited By Ranjini Srikanth and Elora Halim Chowdhury

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice is an edited collection that brings together analyses of human rights work from multiple disciplines. Within the academic sphere, this book will garner interest from scholars who are invested in human rights as a field of study, as well as those who research, and are engaged in, the praxis of human rights.

Referring to the historical and cross-cultural study of human rights, the volume engages with disciplinary debates in political philosophy, gender and women’s studies, Global South/Third World studies, international relations, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time, the authors employ diverse methodologies including oral history, theoretical and discourse analysis, ethnography, and literary and cinema studies. Within the field of human rights studies, this book attends to the critical academic gap on interdisciplinary and praxis-based approaches to the field, as opposed to a predominantly legalistic focus, drawing from case studies from a wide range of contexts in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Haiti, India, Mexico, Palestine, and Sudan, as well as from Australia and the United States in the Global North.

For students who will go on to become researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, this collection of essays will demonstrate the multifaceted landscape of human rights and the multiple forces (philosophical, political, cultural, economic, historical) that affect it.

Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique

(Oxford University Press, 2011)

By Sally Haslanger

Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice.

Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. 

Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.

The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830

(University of Chicago Press, 2014)

By Sue Lanser

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. 

In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in “closeted” texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

(Harper Paperback, 2014)

By Carla Kaplan

Celebrated scholar Carla Kaplan’s cultural biography, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, focuses on white women, collectively called “Miss Anne,” who became Harlem Renaissance insiders.
 
The 1920s in New York City was a time of freedom, experimentation, and passion—with Harlem at the epicenter. White men could go uptown to see jazz and modern dance, but women who embraced black culture too enthusiastically could be ostracized.
 
Miss Anne in Harlem focuses on six of the unconventional, free-thinking women, some from Manhattan high society, many Jewish, who crossed race lines and defied social conventions to become a part of the culture and heartbeat of Harlem.
 
Ethnic and gender studies professor Carla Kaplan brings the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance to life with vivid prose, extensive research, and period photographs.

The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance is Hurting Women, Men - and Our Economy

(Tarcher/Penguin, 2015)

By Rosalind Barnett

For the first time in history, women make up half the educated labor force and are earning the majority of advanced degrees. It should be the best time ever for women, and yet... it’s not. Storm clouds are gathering, and the worst thing is that most women don’t have a clue what could be coming. In large part this is because the message they’re being fed is that they now have it made. But do they? 

In The New Soft War on Women, respected experts on gender issues and the psychology of women Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett argue that an insidious war of subtle biases and barriers is being waged that continues to marginalize women. Although women have made huge strides in recent years, these gains have not translated into money and influence. Consider the following: 

- Women with MBAs earn, on average, $4,600 less than their male counterparts in their first job out of business school.

- Female physicians earn, on average, 39 percent less than male physicians.

- Female financial analysts take in 35 percent less, and female chief executives one quarter less than men in similar positions.

In this eye-opening book, Rivers and Barnett offer women the real facts as well as tools for combating the “soft war” tactics that prevent them from advancing in their careers. With women now central to the economy, determining to a large degree whether it thrives or stagnates, this is one war no one can afford for them to lose.

Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform

(Duke University Press, 2018)

By Libby Adler

In Gay Priori Libby Adler offers a comprehensive critique of mainstream LGBT legal agendas in the United States and a new direction for LGBT law reform. Adler shows how LGBT equal rights discourse drives legal advocates toward a narrow array of reform objectives—namely, same-sex marriage, antidiscrimination protections, and hate crimes statutes. This approach means that many legal issues that greatly impact the lives of the LGBT community's most marginalized members—especially those who are transgender, homeless, underage, or nonwhite—often go unnoticed. Such a narrow focus on equal rights also fixes and flattens LGBT identities, perpetuates the uneven distribution of resources such as safety, housing, health, and wealth, and limits the capacity for advocates to imagine change. To combat these effects, Adler calls for prioritizing the redistribution of resources in ways that focus on addressing low-profile legal conditions such as foster care and other issues that better meet the needs of LGBT people. Such a shift in perspective, Adler contends, will serve to open up a new world of reform possibilities that the law provides for.

Gender and Risk-Taking: Economics, Evidence, and Why the Answer Matters

(Routledge, 2017)

By Julie A. Nelson

The belief that men and women have fundamentally distinct natures, resulting in divergent preferences and behaviours, is widespread. Recently, economists have also engaged in the search for gender differences, with a number claiming to find fundamental gender differences regarding risk-taking, altruism, and competition. In particular, the idea that "women are more risk-averse than men" has become accepted as a truism. But is it true? And what are its causes and consequences?

Gender and Risk Taking makes three contributions. First, it asks whether the belief that men and women have distinct risk preferences is backed up by high quality empirical evidence. The answer turns out to be "no." This leads to a second question: Why, then, does so much of the literature claim to find evidence of "difference"? This, it will be shown, can be attributed to biases arising from too-easy categorical thinking, widespread stereotyping, and a tendency to prefer results that are publishable and that fit one’s prior beliefs. Third, the book explores the economic implications of the conventional association of risk-taking with masculinity and risk-aversion with femininity. Not only fairness in employment, but also the health of the financial sector and national responses to climate change, this book argues, are being compromised.

This volume will be eye-opening for anyone interested in gender, decision-making, cognition, and/or risk, especially in areas relating to employment, finance, management, or public policy.

Unmasking Masculinities: Men and Society

(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2018)

By Edward Morris and Freeden Blume-Oeur

Unmasking Masculinities: Men and Society is a new anthology that provides a fresh and comprehensive introduction to the field of critical masculinity studies. Grounded in the theories of masculinities with explicit connections between various theoretical perspectives and the readings, this book examines unique domains, such as the Presidency or men′s responses to feminism. Through the book’s emphasis on cross-cultural perspectives and experiences, readers will find new and provocative takes on masculinity today, such as nerd masculinity, female masculinity, misogyny through social media, feminism and men, and men’s intimate relationships with other men.  

Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools

(University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

By Freeden Blume Oeur

While single-sex public schools face much criticism, many Black communities see in them a great promise: that they can remedy a crisis for their young men. Black Boys Apart reveals triumphs, hope, and heartbreak at two all-male schools, a public high school and a charter high school, drawing on Freeden Blume Oeur’s ethnographic work. We meet young men who felt their schools empowered and emasculated them, parents who were frustrated with co-ed schools, teachers who helped pave the road to college, and administrators who saw in Black male academies the advantages of privatizing education.
 
While the two schools have distinctive histories and ultimately charted different paths, they were both shaped by the convergence of neoliberal ideologies and a politics of Black respectability. As Blume Oeur reveals, all-boys education is less a school reform initiative and instead joins a legacy of efforts to reform Black manhood during periods of stark racial inequality. Black male academies join long-standing attempts to achieve racial uplift in Black communities, but in ways that elevate exceptional young men and aggravate divisions within those communities.
 
Black Boys Apart shows all-boys schools to be an odd mix of democratic empowerment and market imperatives, racial segregation and intentional sex separation, strict discipline and loving care. Challenging narratives that endorse these schools for nurturing individual resilience in young Black men, this perceptive and penetrating ethnography argues for a holistic approach in which Black communities and their allies promote a collective resilience.

Feminist Approaches To Theory And Methodology

(Oxford University Press, 1999)
Edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber, Christina Gilmartin, Robin Lydenberg 

Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology addresses the theoretical issues raised by doing feminist research from an interdisciplinary perspective. Bringing together the work of leading scholars and emerging new critics, the editors have selected the best, most representative and recent work in feminist scholarship.

The collection is organized around key issues in feminist theory and empirical research as impacted by post-structuralist dialogue. Several essays address the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge building, exposing male biases embedded in disciplinary paradigms. Other essays deal with dramatic changes in two foundational concepts in feminist theory—identity and experience—which are presented not as innate and unproblematic, but as constituted by discourse, representation, and the effects of power. Additional essays examine the complex terrain in which differences within and between women are used as tools of oppression and of resistance both inside and outside feminist praxis. These essays uncover a subtext of racial anxiety, offering critical insights for academic and social change.

The gender dynamics of power and resistance are taken up by several critics whose research encourages the development of a feminist scholarly methodology that focuses on women's subjective experiences, the ways in which they mediate relations of power, and their capacity for implementing personal and collective activism. These essays deal with the importance in feminist scholarship of resisting the inclination to view women as passive and powerless victims. Another major focus of the volume brings together visual and discursive representations of the female body in which heterosexuality and reproduction are imposed as the norm.

The volume concludes with a set of essays which presents students with some methodological and political dilemmas feminists encounter as they expose the underlying ideological distortions in existing social policies. Distinct for its interdisciplinary scope as well as its global orientation, Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology is an ideal text for courses in a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines including research methods and women's studies.