Empfehlungen basierend auf "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism"

In the wake of Sassy and as an alternative to the more staid reporting of Ms., Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism―and vice versa―and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.

The second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in classical Greek culture. From the stranger byways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex, as well as exercise and diet) to the role of women, The Use of Pleasure is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds, showing how sex became a moral issue in the west.

Should western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations understandings of harmful traditional/cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should.In the 1970s feminists criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but some ‘new’ feminists argue that beauty practices are no longer oppressive now that women can ‘choose’ them. However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women’s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women’s health.

Burning dinners, stitching "scandalous" quilts, talking "hard" in the male dominated world of rap music---Feminist Messages interprets such acts as instances of coding, or covert expressions of subversive or disturbing ideas. While coding may be either deliberated or unconscious, it is a common phenomenon in women's stories, art, and daily routines. Because it is essentially ambiguous, coding protects women from potentially dangerous responses from those who might be troubled by their messages.

In contemporary feminist theory, the problem of feminine subjectivity persistently appears and reappears as the site that grounds all discussion of feminism. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists' capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom. Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging. In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism's lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

Autotheory--the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography--as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.In the 2010s, the term "autotheory" began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.

What happens when your gender doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of male or female? Even mundane interactions like filling out a form or using a public bathroom can be a struggle when these designations prove inadequate. In this groundbreaking book, thirty authors highlight how our experiences are shaped by a deeply entrenched gender binary. The powerful first-person narratives of this collection show us a world where gender exists along a spectrum, a web, a multidimensional space. Nuanced storytellers break away from mainstream portrayals of gender diversity, cutting across lines of age, race, ethnicity, ability, class, religion, family, and relationships. From Suzi, who wonders whether she’ll ever “feel” like a woman after living fifty years as a man, to Aubri, who grew up in a cash-strapped fundamentalist household, to Sand, who must reconcile the dual roles of trans advocate and therapist, the writers’ conceptions of gender are inextricably intertwined with broader systemic issues. Labeled gender outlaws, gender rebels, genderqueer, or simply human, the voices in Nonbinary illustrate what life could be if we allowed the rigid categories of “man” and “woman” to loosen and bend. They speak to everyone who has questioned gender or has paused to wonder, What does it mean to be a man or a woman—and why do we care so much?

What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? "Design justice" is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability." Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

Managing the Monstrous Feminine takes a unique approach to the study of the material and discursive practices associated with the construction and regulation of the female body. Jane Ussher examines the ways in which medicine, science, the law and popular culture combine to produce fictions about femininity, positioning the reproductive body as the source of women's power, danger and weakness. Including sections on 'regulation', 'the subjectification of women' and 'women's negotiation and resistance', this book describes the construction of the 'monstrous feminine' in mythology, art, literature and film, revealing its implications for the regulation and experience of the fecund female body. Critical reviews are combined with case studies and extensive interview material to illuminate discussions of subjects including: the regulation of women through the body regimes of knowledge associated with reproduction intersubjectivity and the body women's narratives of resistance. These insights into the relation between the construction of the female body and women's subjectivity will be of interest to those studying health psychology, social psychology, medical sociology, gender studies and cultural studies. The book will also appeal to all those looking for a high-level introduction to contemporary feminist thought on the female body.

A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in Women's Studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of the history of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. The author argues that male dominance over women is the product of historicaldevelopment and is not "natural" or biological and hence unchangeable. Therefore patriarchy as a system of organizing society can be ended by historical process.Lerner focuses on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of interpretation and explanation. This fascinating paradox leads her to an exploration of nearly 2,600 years of human history and into the cultures of theancient Near East, notably the Mesopotamian and ancient Hebrew societies, from whence the major gender metaphors of Western civilization are largely derived. Using historical, literary, archeological, and artistic evidence, Lerner traces the development of the leading ideas, symbols and metaphorsby which partiarchal gender relations were incorporated into Western civilization.The book abounds with brilliant--and controversial--insights. Lerner propounds a startling new theory of class, showing the different ways in which class is structured for and experienced by men and women. She locates the origins of slavery in the earlier practice of "exchanging women" inmarriage among tribes and shows that women of conquered tribes were the first slaves. In addition, the book contends that the exclusion of women from the role of mediator with the Divine--the dethroning of the fertility goddess and priestesses and the conceptualizing of men and women as essentiallydifferent creatures in Greek philosophy--represented the decisive turning points in the way gender is symbolized in Western civilization.About the Author:Gerda Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of such books as Black Women in White America, The Female Experience: An American Documentary, and The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History.Features:A pioneer in women's studies radically restructures the history of Western civilization in terms of gender* Traces the development of the ideas and symbols by which the patriarchal system emerged* Certain to stir controversy in a wide range of intellectual circles