The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. Stereotypes depict Islamic societies as economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But in fact, the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and a great deal of variation within those cultures ......
Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion Before the Sixties
In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young ......
A lesbian romance from seventeenth-century France Iphis and Iante are about to be married, but Iphis has a secret: when she was born, her mother disguised her as a boy in order to save her life. Although Iphis loves Iante passionately, Iphis's mother tries to prevent the marriage in order to conceal Iphis's real identity. The bachelor Ergaste has ......
A lesbian romance from seventeenth-century France Iphis and Iante are about to be married, but Iphis has a secret: when she was born, her mother disguised her as a boy in order to save her life. Although Iphis loves Iante passionately, Iphis's mother tries to prevent the marriage in order to conceal Iphis's real identity. The bachelor Ergaste has ......
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the ......
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and ......
From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this ......
Adrienne Rich is a major American poet who continues to be inspired by the political ideas and activism of various liberation movements of the twentieth century. Whether expressed in poetry or in prose, her ideas have been much debated, particularly within second wave feminism. This unique introduction focuses on Rich's prose work but also makes reference to the poetry where her political ideas and urgencies often find their first expression. Demonstrating the compexity and subtlety of her contribution to feminism, the book outlines her wide-ranging thoughts on, for example, motherhood, heterosexuality, lesbian and Jewish identity, and issues of racial and sexual otherness. Liz Yorke conveys the range and importance of Rich's achievements and highlights the major themes which are interwoven in her work.