Recommendations based on "Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions)"

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.

'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.

Adding to the debate on a range of issues, this book presents a critical and deeply personal history of Mexican feminism in the last thirty five years. Drawing from her many years of activism and anthropological scholarship, influential thinker Marta Lamas covers topics such as the political development of the feminist movement, affirmative action in the workplace, conceptual advances in regard to gender, and disagreements among feminists. Here in English for the first time, this work offers invaluable insight into the theoretical and political tensions that have shaped Mexican feminism and the world at large.

A dynamic and strikingly relevant look at a feminist canon as expansive rather than definitiveA Penguin ClassicFor Roxane Gay, a feminist canon is subjective and always evolving. A feminist canon represents a long history of feminist scholarship, embraces skepticism, and invites robust discussion and debate. Selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Eileen Myles, Mona Eltahawy, bell hooks, Sarah Ahmed, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and many more. With an introduction, headnotes, and an inspired list of multimedia recommendations, Roxane Gay presents multicultural perspectives, ecofeminism, feminism and disability, feminist labor, gender perspectives, and Black feminism. Through the Portable Feminist Reader, readers explore the state of American feminism, its successes and failures, and what feminism looks like in practice, as a complex, contradictory, personal and political, and ever-growing legacy of feminist thought.

We talk about feminism in the workplace and we talk about dating after #MeToo, but women's own patriarchal conditioning can be the hardest enemy to defeat. When it comes to our sex lives, few of us are free of niggling fears and body image insecurities. Rather than enjoying and exploring our bodies uninhibited, we worry about our bikini lines, bulging tummies and whether we're doing it 'right'.Flo broaches everything from faking it to consent, stress to kink, and how losing your virginity isn't so different to eating your first chocolate croissant. Her mission is to get more people talking openly about what they do and don't want from every romantic encounter.

In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today. In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hoo

Why do men do so little at home? Why do women do so much? Why don't our egalitarian values match our lived experiences? Journalist-turned-psychologist Darcy Lockman offers a clear-eyed look at the most pernicious problem facing modern parents—how progressive relationships become traditional ones when children are introduced into the household. In an era of seemingly unprecedented feminist activism, enlightenment, and change, data shows that one area of gender inequality stubbornly persists: the disproportionate amount of parental work that falls to women, no matter their background, class, or professional status. All the Rage investigates the cause of this pervasive inequity to answer why, in households where both parents work full-time and agree that tasks should be equally shared, mothers’ household management, mental labor, and childcare contributions still outweigh fathers’.  How, in a culture that pays lip service to women’s equality and lauds the benefits of father involvement—benefits that extend far beyond the well-being of the kids themselves—can a commitment to fairness in marriage melt away upon the arrival of children? Counting on male partners who will share the burden, women today have been left with what political scientists call unfulfilled, rising expectations. Historically these unmet expectations lie at the heart of revolutions, insurgencies, and civil unrest. If so many couples are living this way, and so many women are angered or just exhausted by it, why do we remain so stuck? Where is our revolution, our insurgency, our civil unrest? Darcy Lockman drills deep to find answers, exploring how the feminist promise of true domestic partnership almost never, in fact, comes to pass. Starting with her own marriage as a ground zero case study, she moves outward, chronicling the experiences of a diverse cross-section of women raising children with men; visiting new mothers’ groups and pioneering co-parenting specialists; and interviewing experts across academic fields, from gender studies professors and anthropologists to neuroscientists and primatologists. Lockman identifies three tenets that have upheld the cultural gender division of labor and peels back the ways in which both men and women unintentionally perpetuate old norms. If we can all agree that equal pay for equal work should be a given, can the same apply to unpaid work? Can justice finally come home?

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.

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.

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