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'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' GuardianSimone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence.Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice.Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed.Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

'A groundbreaking work . . .Federici has become a crucial figurefor . . .a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars RoomA cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

Motherhood is a political state. Helen Charman makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s. When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them, too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that "a man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem." Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?" Bauer's aim is to show that in answering this question The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem.This book is a call for philosophers as well as feminists to turn, or return to, The Second Sex. Bauer shows that Beauvoir's magnum opus, written a quarter-century before the development of contemporary feminist philosophy, constitutes a meditation on the relationship between women and philosophy that remains profoundly undervalued. She argues that the extraordinary effect The Second Sex has had on women's lives, then and now, can be traced to Beauvoir's discovery of a new way to philosophize―a way grounded in her identity as a woman. In offering a new interpretation of The Second Sex, Bauer shows how philosophy can be politically productive for women while remaining genuinely philosophical.

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt? Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

Here at last is a comprehensive and highly approachable introduction to lesbian and gay studies for students and general readers. More than one hundred articles, essays, and primary documents cover the formation of gay identity, religious, scientific, medical, and legal perspectives, the mainstream media, lesbian and gay media, and community prospects and tactics. From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," to a 1947 Newsweek article, "Homosexuals in Uniform," The Columbia Reader explores experiences and representations of lesbian and gay people in an engaging and accessible format. The Columbia Reader features: * concise introductions to each section, as well as a substantial general introduction * viewpoints--ranging from radical to conservative--of lesbian and gay scholars and community writers, as well as nongay intellectuals and public figures * essays, articles, and primary documents from both mainstream and lesbian/gay sources * detailed exploration of mainstream media representations of gays and lesbians in films, television, and print as well as the rise of lesbian/gay media outlets * broad coverage of history and identity, social, cultural, legal, medical, and religious regulation, AIDS, and lesbian and gay political agendas and strategies * current topics, such as the recent development of a cybercommunity, as well as questions of censorship and pornography, same-sex marriage, the ethics of "outing," gay and lesbian activism, and the conservative backlash Grounded in key social and political topics rather than wholly theoretical approaches, The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics will be a valuable resource for years to come.

"Queer theory," asserts Linda Garber, "alternately buries and vilifies lesbian feminism, missing its valuable insights and ignoring its rich contributions." Rejecting the either/or choice between lesbianism and queer theory, she favors an inclusive approach that defies current factionalism. In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical--and intellectually significant--role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism. The connections, Garber shows, are most clearly seen when looking at the pivotal work of working-class lesbians/lesbians of color whose articulations of multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics both belong to lesbian feminism and presage queer theory. Identity Poetics includes a critical overview of recent historical writing about the women's and lesbian-feminist movements of the 1970s; discussions of the works of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Anzaldúa; and, finally, a chapter on the rise and hegemony of queer theory within lesbigay studies.