"Provocative reflections on a generation of feminist scholarship."--Provided by publisher.
McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history of African women across centuries. These images tell how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods. She shows that, while African studios captured the dignity, austerity, and grandeur of African women, photos by Europeans are mostly nudes, revealing the relationships of white men and Black females: at best, a grave power imbalance. -- Adapted from jacket.
"Over the past thirty years, a strong canon of Indigenous feminist literature has addressed how Indigenous women are uniquely and dually affected by colonialism and patriarchy. Indigenous women have long recognized that their intersectional realities were not represented in mainstream feminism, which was principally white, middle-class, and often ignored realities of colonialism. As Indigenous feminist ideals grew, Indigenous women became increasingly multi-vocal, with multiple and oppositional understandings of what constituted Indigenous feminism and whether or not it was a useful concept. Emerging from these dialogues are conversations from a new generation of scholars, activists, artists, and storytellers who accept the usefulness of Indigenous feminism and seek to broaden the concept. In Good Relation captures this transition and makes sense of Indigenous feminist voices that are not necessarily represented in existing scholarship. There is a need to further Indigenize our understandings of feminism and to take the scholarship beyond a focus on motherhood, life history, or legal status (in Canada) to consider the connections between Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous philosophies, the environment, kinship, violence, and Indigenous Queer Studies. Organized around the notion of "generations," this collection brings into conversation new voices of Indigenous feminist theory, knowledge, and experience. Taking a broad and critical interpretation of Indigenous feminism, it depicts how an emerging generation of artists, activists, and scholars are envisioning and invigorating the strength and power of Indigenous women."-- Provided by publisher
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities. The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture -- primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration. This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman--identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy. This book emerges from the project Women Picturing Revolution. For more information, visit womenpicturingrevolution.com.
Throughout history, records of high-achieving women have been lost through the pervasive assumption of male dominance. Independently-performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands' work, as unpaid and often unacknowledged secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men's domestic domains; even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. 'Forgotten Wives' examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active 'disremembering' of women's achievements. Ann Oakley interrogates conventions of history and biography writing using the case-studies of four women married to well-known men - Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend) , Mary Booth (née Macaulay), Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) and Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair).
"Taking a transnational approach, this book challenges the belief that the Muslim world is unrelentingly antifeminist. The author challenges assumptions about inevitable civilizational antagonism between the "West" and the "Muslim world," a notion that has become increasingly popular in recent decades, and of a lag in the emergence of feminism in the latter. While it shouldn't be controversial to insist that male bias and privilege are present in Western as well as in Muslim-majority societies, it is more difficult to show how and why efforts to improve women's lives in even these geographically distant parts of the world have long been interconnected and interdependent. Sisters in the Mirror is a feminist story about how changing global and local power disparities-between Europeans and Bengalis, between Brahmos, Hindus, and Muslims within Bengal, between feminists of the global North and South, and between Western and Muslim feminists-have shaped ideas about change in women's lives and also the strategies by which to enact change. With the lasting shift in the balance of economic, political, and military power between Muslim and Euro-American nations toward the latter since the eighteenth century, Muslim advocates for women's rights have had to define their agendas for reform in the shadow of Western imperial and economic power. The stories in this book show that no society has a monopoly on ideas about justice and fairness (in the matter of women's or any other group's rights) or, for that matter, on male bias, violence, and injustice; no community is isolated or pure; and people everywhere are enriched by open-minded encounters with people who eat, dress, and pray differently, or don't pray at all"-- Provided by publisher.
Citizens of Everywhere traces the international careers of a cohort of extraordinary Indian women leaders during the final decades of colonial rule. Working in pursuit of the dual goals of Indian independence and women's rights, the women featured in this book established productive transnational connections to gain influence on the world stage, all against the backdrop of momentous events in India and beyond. In doing so, they contributed a distinct set of ideas to global conversations about rights and citizenship. By bringing this transnational activism to light, the author offers new perspectives on Indian nationalism. More broadly the book establishes Indian women as actors in the global histories of women's rights and international movements during the era of decolonisation.
"In Dissident Practices, Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present, covering the period from the military dictatorship to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late-2010s, and the recent development of an overtly feminist art practice. Though they were lauded as key figures in Brazilian art, these artists still faced adversity and constraints because of their gender. Although many of them in the 1960s and 1970s disavowed the term feminism, Calirman gives a nuanced account of how they responded to authoritarianism, engaged with trauma in the aftermath of the military dictatorship, interrogated social gender norms, and fought against women's objectification. By battling social inequalities, structures of power, and state violence, these artists create political agency in a society where women remain targets of brutality and discrimination"-- Provided by publisher.
"From Joan of Arc to Queen Elizabeth I, to Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, to Sally Ride and Jennifer Aniston, history is full of women without children. Some chose to forgo reproduction in order to pursue intellectually satisfying work-a tension noted by medieval European nuns, 1970s women's liberationists, and modern professionals alike. Some refused to bring children into a world beset by famine, pollution, or climate change. For others, childlessness was involuntary: infertility has been a source of anguish all the way back to the biblical Hannah. But most women without children didn't--and don't--perceive themselves as either proudly childfree or tragically barren. Seventeenth century French colonists in North America, struggling without the kind of community support they enjoyed in their mother country, found themselves postponing children until a better moment that, for many of them, never arrived. It is women like these-whose ambivalence throughout their child-bearing years inevitably makes their choice for them-that make up the vast majority of millennials without children in the United States. Drawing on deep archival research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell shows modern women who are struggling to build lives and to figure out whether those lives allow for children that they are part of a long historical lineage-and that they are certainly not alone"-- Provided by publisher.
"What is about about women in their forties and beyond that seems to enrage - almost everyone? In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused. Hags asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies and choices. Victoria Smith traces the attitudes she describes back to the same anxieties about older women that drove Early Modern witch hunts, and explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so powerful today. The demonisation of hags has never felt more now. Victoria Smith has decided in this book that she will be the Karen so nobody else has to be, and she ends on a positive note, exploring potential solutions which can benefit all women, hags and hags-in-waiting"--Publisher's description.
