Women's Studies

"This book is bound to have a wide audience among both political theorists and feminists. One of its strengths is its analysis of the way in which the theories of freedom of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill are gendered. Hirschmann argues pointedly with other feminist interpretations of these... More

The members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) have risked life and limb daily to help their tortured sisters in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1977. "With All Our Strength" is the inside story of this women-led underground organization and their fight for the rights... More

'As a leading international civil servant, Margaret Anstee has lived with the great themes of post-war history: poverty, conflict and the unending difficulty of limiting either. But she also writes of romance and travel, friendship and daily incident - even about making herself a ball-gown out of a ... More

'As a leading international civil servant, Margaret Anstee has lived with the great themes of post-war history: poverty, conflict and the unending difficulty of limiting either. But she also writes of romance and travel, friendship and daily incident - even about making herself a ball-gown out of a ... More

that obscure and perpetuate women's disadvantages.... More

Revered or reviled, Gertrude Bell was a commanding figure: scholar, linguist, archaeologist, traveler and "Orientalist." Belonging to the tradition of the great British Middle East enthusiasts of the early twentieth century, she explored the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I and was (along... More

A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Morata (1526-1555) was attacked by some as a "Calvinist Amazon" but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned women. This book publishes, for the first time, all her known writings--orations, dialogues, letters, and poems... More

This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community. It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostituti... More

Exploring the idea of knowledge as embodied, engendered and embedded in place and space, gender and sexuality are re-examined through the methodological and conceptual lenses of cartography, fieldwork, resistance, transgression and the divisions between local/global and public/private space. "BodySp... More

"Thinking Fragments" provides a brilliant critique of psychoanalytic, feminist, and postmodern theory. Examining the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Irigaray, Derrida, Rorty, and Foucault, among others, Flax conducts a "conversation" among psychoanalysts, feminist thinkers, and postmo... More

"Feminist Political Ecology" explores the gendered relations of ecologies, economies and politics in communities as diverse as the rubbertappers in the rainforests of Brazil to activist groups fighting racism in New York City. Women are often at the center of these struggles, which concern local kno... More

In this provocative new book, France's leading feminist theorist launches a broadside against the way in which feminism has evolved since the 1990s. After the victories of the previous decades, during which women had made some real advances in social and political life, a new sensibility began to em... More

Through a series of provocative readings of theatre, theory and feminist performance, Elin Diamond demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today. Unmaking Mimesis will interest theatre scholars and performance and cultural theorists, for all of whom issues of t... More

"Feminist Philosophies A-Z" covers contemporary material in a number of feminist approaches. It illustrates the complexity, range and interconnectedness of issues in feminist philosophy while making clear the relationship of feminist philosophy to the rest of philosophy as a discipline (epistemology... More

Myths: Violence is a male biological trait. When women fight, no one gets seriously hurt. Lesbians don't abuse their spouses. The truth revealed in Janice Ristock's groundbreaking book is that lesbian relationships sometimes do turn violent. Based on interviews with more than one hundred lesbians wh... More

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette -- the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius" -- will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.Colette (1873-1954) was a pr... More

"Representing Rape" is the first feminist analysis of the language of sexual assault trials from the perspective of linguists. Susan Ehrlich argues that language is central to all legal settings - specifically sexual harassment and acquaintance rape hearings where linguistic descriptions of the even... More