Essays by the author of Fatal Flowers

A truly liberated rhetoric and reader has at last become available to courses in composition, with the publication of A Woman's Place. This unique textbook explores the notion of writing as self-definition and, as a consequence, the relationship between gender and writing. Convinced that writing is a meaningful process, performed with commitment, Dr. Morahan has created a course that simultaneously sharpens writing and thinking skills and contributes to the consciousness-raising of women and men in today's world. Her "pedagogy for liberation" creates a student-centered classroom, in which a spirit of collaboration replaces one of competition, by means of peer editing, tutorial approaches, and small group activities. The literary passages of A Woman's Place are, both stylistically and thematically, tied in with the lessons directly. At the same time, they function as a compact women's studies course. Research and writing are organized around a cluster of shared themes—problems that all students are addressing in their lives: power vs. powerlessness, passivity vs. action, identity, oppression vs. freedom, and the nurturance of creativity. Taken from the works of professional writers, including such well-known individuals as Adrienne Rich, Tillie Olsen, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Mead, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jonathan Swift, and Sylvia Plath, they are often accompanied by short excerpts from student essays. Useful bibliographical notes suggest further readings.

In the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, a series of stock characters emerged to define and bolster white masculinity. Alongside such caricatures as "the Playboy" and "the Redneck" came a new creation: "the Male Chauvinist Pig." Coined by second-wave feminists as an insult, the Male Chauvinist Pig was largely defined by an anti-feminism that manifested in boorish sexist jokes. But the epithet backfired: being a sexist pig quickly transformed into a badge of honor worn proudly by misogynists, and, in time, it would come to define a strain of right-wing politics. Historian Julie Willett tracks the ways in which the sexist pig was sanitized by racism, popularized by consumer culture, weaponized to demean feminists, and politicized to mobilize libertine sexists to adopt reactionary politics. Mapping out a trajectory that links the sexist buffoonery of Bobby Riggs in the 1970s, the popularity of Rush Limbaugh's screeds against "Feminazis" in the 1990s, and the present day misogyny underpinning Trumpism, Willett makes a case for the potency of this seemingly laughable cultural symbol, showing what can happen when we neglect or trivialize the political power of humor.

Confessions is a psychological thriller, page-turning revelation about misplaced trust and the irreparable harm to the female psyche caused by relationships with men. Lane Stone has been a twenty-five year prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office, and now practices criminal defense. Claiming justice after a devastating experience of erotic transference with her psychologist of thirty years, she takes justice into her own hands. Through the encouragement of the only true love Lane has ever known - Christopher, she seems to be redeemed. Doubt as to Lanes motives is raised by Chris best friend, Jimmy, an LAPD cop, but the mature unbreakable bond Lane shares with Christopher seems strong enough to put Lanes demons to rest. Can the obsessive need for revenge ever be satiated? Only you, the readers can hand down the verdict on Lane Stone.

In this passionate report from the front lines, a "New York" magazine writer examines the enormous cultural impact of the newest wave of post-feminism.

Everyone has a story to tell. Fearless Confessions is a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper—or in a Web site or e-book. Enhanced with illustrative examples from many different writers as well as writing exercises, this guide helps writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing and will be useful to both beginners and more accomplished writers. The rise of interest in memoir recognizes the power of the genre to move and affect not just individual readers but society at large. Sue William Silverman covers traditional writing topics such as metaphor, theme, plot, and voice and also includes chapters on trusting memory and cultivating the courage to tell one's truth in the face of forces—from family members to the media—who would prefer that people with inconvenient pasts and views remain silent. Silverman, an award-winning memoirist, draws upon her own personal and professional experience to provide an essential resource for transforming life into words that matter. Fearless Confessions is an atlas that contains maps to the remarkable places in each person's life that have yet to be explored.

This book takes readers on a fascinating intellectual journey that showcases SHE-Q as the next great emerging intelligence—a force that can remake the world. The hypothesis of SHE-Q: Why Women Should Mentor Men and Change the World is straightforward, its potential enormous. Females, SHE-Q declares, are the superior, whole-brained, empathic sex. Society's failure to recognize that fact has caused women to labor under a limited, male perspective, skewing their knowledge, capping their wisdom and separating them from Nature, themselves, and each other. But it doesn't have to be that way. Interweaving personal vignettes with broad-based research, the book marshals evidence from history, science, psychology, and philosophy to underscore the validity of SHE-Q. It shows how the female brain works differently from the male brain, better integrating the left and right hemispheres so that SHE-Q transcends both IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional intelligence). Laying out a new, feminine-based understanding of the way women and men think and behave, author Michele Takei demonstrates how women can apply this new-found knowledge to mentor the men in their lives—and achieve true equality.

Uncensored, uncontained, and thoroughly demented, the memoirs of Paul Krassner are back in an updated and expanded edition. Paul Krassner, “father of the underground press” (People magazine), founder of the Realist, political radical, Yippie, and award-winning stand-up satirist, shares his stark raving adventures with the likes of Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Groucho Marx, and Squeaky Fromme, revealing the patriarch of counterculture’s ultimate, intimate, uproarious life on the fringes of society. Whether he’s writing about his friendship with controversial comic Lenny Bruce, introducing Groucho Marx to LSD, his investigation of Scientology, or John Kennedy’s cadaver, no subject is too sacred to be skewered by Krassner. And yet his stories are soulful and philosophical, always authentic to his iconoclastic brand of personal journalism. As Art Spiegelman said, “Krassner is one of the best minds of his generational to be destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked—but mainly hysterical. His true wacky, wackily true autobiography is the definitive book on the sixties.”

Reading Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf’s canonical A Room of One’s Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women’s road narratives. The study shows how women’s literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque “open road”, or, more generally, the “freedom of the road”. Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it. The book analyzes stories about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnappees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatiality and mobility—debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn in the humanities. The analytical concept of transdifference is introduced to theorize the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the narrative tensions produced by such pluralities in order to better understand the textual worlds of women’s multiple belongings as they are present in these writings. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and literary studies. Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey – Rosi Braidotti – Literary Studies – Spatial Turn – Gendered Space and Mobility – Nomadism – Road writing – Transdifference – American Culture – Popular Culture – Women’s Literature after the Second Wave – Quest – Picara.