Recommendations based on "On the Inconvenience of Other People"

Misogyny is a hot topic, yet it's often misunderstood. What is misogyny, exactly? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny contrast with sexism, and why is it prone to persist - or increase - even when sexist gender roles are waning? This book is an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics by the moral philosopher and writer Kate Manne. It argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the "bad" women who challenge male dominance. And it's compatible with rewarding "the good ones," and singling out other women to serve as warnings to those who are out of order. It's also common for women to serve as scapegoats, be burned as witches, and treated as pariahs.Manne examines recent and current events such as the Isla Vista killings by Elliot Rodger, the case of the convicted serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, who preyed on African-American women as a police officer in Oklahoma City, Rush Limbaugh's diatribe against Sandra Fluke, and the "misogyny speech" of Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, which went viral on YouTube. The book shows how these events, among others, set the stage for the 2016 US presidential election. Not only was the misogyny leveled against Hillary Clinton predictable in both quantity and quality, Manne argues it was predictable that many people would be prepared to forgive and forget regarding Donald Trump's history of sexual assault and harassment. For this, Manne argues, is misogyny's oft-overlooked and equally pernicious underbelly: exonerating or showing "himpathy" for the comparatively privileged men who dominate, threaten, and silence women.

A study of the future of feminism calls for a return to the radical roots of feminism's direct political struggle during the 1960s and early 1970s and a move away from the de-politicized focus on women's psychology and personal relations of today.

An exploration of the paralells between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries and their representations in art, literature and film, this book asks whether the approaching millenium signals a beginning or points grimly to an end, and whether the ends of centuries are merely imaginery borderlines in time, or cycles, such as the crises of the "fin de siecle" and the sense of ending so ominously present in the works of contemporary writers and artists. The novelist George Gissing remarked that the 1880s and 1890s were decades of sexual anarchy, when the notions of gender that governed sexual identity and behaviour were being constantly eroded. It was a time when the words "feminism" and "homosexuality" came into use, redefining accepted ideas of masculine and feminine, and a time when the "emancipated woman" was viewed as a threat to family stability. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in this book the author points out the similarity between that time and this time. The sexual abuse of children and the increasing frequency of rape; the censoring of art and the banning of pornography; anti-abortion campaigns and the AIDs epidemic - these late-20th-century crises are, the author suggests, comparable to their "fin de siecle" counterparts. Elaine Showalter is also the author of "A Literature of Their Own: Women Writers from Bronte to Lessing" and "The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830 - 1980".

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.

A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society's choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history--and the data--reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, Writing on the Body explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class and sexual categories. Complemented by the editors' introduction, Writing on the Body is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

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.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions. Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

What happens when we consider Africa through a feminist lens and feminism through an African one? And what does it mean to centre selfhood in this journey? In this shining, wide-ranging inquiry, Minna Salami explores these questions through an unhesitating and incisive vision of African feminist political philosophy. Drawing from feminist thought, postcolonial theory, historical insights, and African knowledge systems, Salami combines personal reflection with cultural criticism to offer a vivid and cohesive discussion about power, identity, patriarchy, imagination, and the human condition. Grounded in Africa’s enduring visions of agency and autonomy, Can Feminism Be African? opens new paths for rethinking the narratives that shape our world. This is a timely and thought-provoking read, calling us to rethink the past, present, and future through new perspectives.