Explore the vast range of titles available.

Written by an international group of feminist scholars and activists, the book explores how the rise in right-wing politics, fundamentalist religion, and radical nationalism is constructed and results in gendered and racial violence. The chapters cover a broad range of international contexts and offer new ways of combating assaults and oppression to understand the dangers inherent within the current global political and social climate. The book includes a foreword by the distinguished critical activist, Antonia Darder, as well as a chapter by renowned feminist-scholar, Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts. This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines. Introduction: Feministm, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison 1. Comparing Cultures: Feminist Theory, Anti-Essentialism and New Humanisms 2. Critical Frameworks: Intersectionality, Relationality and Embodiment 3. Continuums and Analogues: Linking 'African' Female Genital Cutting and 'Western' Body Modifications 4. Constitutive Comparisons: Producing Muslim Veiling, Anorexia and 'Western' Fashion and Beauty Practices 5. Weaving Relational Webs: Theorising Cultural Difference and Embodied Practice '...[Demonstrates] both robust theoretical knowledge and clarity of perspective...' '...[A] highly complex endeavour and a thoroughly enjoyable read for the complexity of its debates, the clarity of its structure and argument, the scope of its critique and the development of the relational web, which is not just a theoretical model but a credible (collective) project for the future. Pedwell has argued her case convincingly but above all with modesty, in full awareness that her critique is not about discrediting previous efforts to address comparisons but about taking the debates to the next stage. The book is consistently mindful of the ethics relating to how this should be done.' -Angie Voela, University of East London in European Journal of Women's Studies vol 18 no 3 Carolyn Pedwell is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her research interests include feminist and postcolonial theory; gender, cultural difference and ‘the body’; and the transnational politics of emotion and affect. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory , Feminist Review , and Body and Society .

Through empowered movement that centers the lives, stories, and dreams of marginalized women, Ananya Dance Theatre has revealed how the practice of and commitment to artistic excellence can catalyze social justice. With each performance, this professional dance company of Black, Brown, and Indigenous gender non-conforming women and femmes of color challenges heteronormative patriarchies, white supremacist paradigms, and predatory global capitalism. Their creative artistic processes and vital interventions have transformed the spaces of contemporary concert dance into sites of empowerment, resistance, and knowledge production. Drawing from more than fifteen years of collaborative dance-making and sustained dialogues based on deep alliances across communities of color, Dancing Transnational Feminisms offers a multigenre exploration of how dance can be intersectionally reimagined as practice, methodology, and metaphor for feminist solidarity. Blending essays with stories, interviews, and poems, this collection explores timely questions surrounding race and performance, gender and sexuality, art and politics, global and local inequities, and the responsibilities of artists toward their communities.

In Practising Feminism, contributors drawn from a range of backgrounds in anthropology, sociology and social psychology, explore different ways of practising feminism and their effect on gendered identities. The contributors examine feminism and gender identities in different cultures, feminism as a politics of transformation, the call for recognition of heterosexuality as a politicised identity, the practical role of feminism in nationalist struggles, power relations and gender differences, and the methodological implications of feminist practices. They all discuss identity, difference and power and their importance to feminist political practice. Practising Feminism is an important contribution to the neglected middle ground between post-modern deconstructions of difference and identity, and continued feminist concern with grounded power relations and the validity of experience.

Thirteen essays bring together the views of expatriate, exiled and émigré feminists from various parts of the world and explore themes of exile, home, displacement and the practice of feminism across national boundaries.

The book Our Bodies, Ourselves is a feminist success story. Selling more than four million copies since its debut in 1970, it has challenged medical dogmas about women's bodies and sexuality, shaped health care policies, energized the reproductive rights movement, and stimulated medical research on women's health. The book has influenced how generations of U.S. women feel about their bodies and health. Our Bodies, Ourselves has also had a whole life outside the United States. It has been taken up, translated, and adapted by women across the globe, inspiring more than thirty foreign language editions. Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book's global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women's health. It was precisely the book's distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

Gendering the State is a ground-breaking collection of studies that examines the efforts of women in countries all over the world to frame public policy debates on nationally critical issues in gendered terms. This is the latest volume in the Research Network on Gender and the State (RNGS) collaborative studies. Using the RNGS model of women's movement and women's policy actor strategies to influence public policy debates and state response, the book looks at data gathered from ten European countries (including Finland and Sweden), plus Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States from the 1990s to today. The overall study is grouped into three distinct patterns of state change: state downsizing—particularly in social policy areas (Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Spain); expansion of state activities into previously less-regulated areas (Austria, France, Germany, and Sweden); and transformation—often constitutionally based—of representative structures (Australia, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom). Examination of these patterns reveals the impact of the changes in state structures and national priorities on the effectiveness and ability of women's movement actors in achieving their goals.

The Women's Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. There are women's movements in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Japan and Australia, and many women and men assume that they are regional manifestations of the same thing, and share a common core. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women's movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women's history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women's movement in four very different cultures. In Italy, she focuses on the violence of the women's movement - its intellectualism and energy. In analysing the American women's movement she dwells on its roots in the past, and its faith in pragmatic solutions. The GDR presents completely different questions, hinging on the relationship between state socialism and feminism. In the UK, Susan Bassnett finds herself returning to that all-pervasive aspect of British life - class, and its importance for feminists. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women's movements and their common ground - the no-man's land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.

Provocative, timely, and global, this volume offers a critical and grounded engagement with transnational feminism through the lens of praxis—the juncture of theory and practice. In so doing, it grapples with questions of power and representation while remaining deeply committed to radical critiques and agendas of transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Long-time activists and well-known scholars speak to a wide range of issues and practices, including women's studies curricula; NGOs; transnational and LGBTQ studies; feminist methodologies; and film. These essays similarly conceptualize ways to more effectively theorize feminist collaborative practices while subverting such rigid, established dichotomies as theory/practice, academic/activist, individual/collaborative, and the global North/South. A number of transnational projects are highlighted: the Guyanese Red Thread collective; the Ananya Dance Theater; the Philippine Women Center of British Columbia; the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance; the VIVA! Project; and the Indian organization Sangtin. Comprehensive in scope and rigorous in critical scrutiny, these powerful essays set the twenty-first-century agenda for political engagement through feminist scholarship. \"The mix of styles makes for a lively read that is accessible for its extraordinary candor, its combination of theory with firmly grounded empirical examples, and an unflinching confrontation of pain and conflict. It made me think about entirely new things and about familiar things in new ways and to make connections among them.\" — Louise Fortmann, University of California Berkeley Amanda Lock Swarr is Assistant Professor of Women Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author (with Sangtin writers) of Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India.

The second wave of feminism which challenged and changed many assumptions about the world in which we live was a product of various western cultures, with no single country possessing a monopoly on the writing of the texts that became the canonical statements of the 'new' feminism. Though many of the contributions to feminist scholarship that went on to become internationally significant hailed from Europe and the United States, these works were often formed within the context of local debates and framed within traditions of feminism and other political engagements specific to these nations. Transatlantic Conversations explores the differences yielded by such conditions and their consequences for the meaning of feminism. Examining the meaning and implications of the different ways in which various shared categories have been treated on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume both analyses differences within feminism and provides a framework for the wider discussion of what is sometimes assumed to be the homogeneity of The West. With leading scholars from either side of the Atlantic presenting brand new work, Transatlantic Conversations suggests directions for future research which will be of interest to scholars of feminism, gender studies, sociology, political science and international relations, geography and cultural studies, as well as anyone concerned with the ways in which the different political and intellectual traditions of Europe and the US have shaped current political and intellectual debates.