A multifaceted analysis of gender.

Employing a broad, interdisciplinary perspective on gender relations, Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East questions long-standing stereotypes about the traditional subordination of women in the region. With essays on gender construction in Iran, Turkey, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and the Occupied Territories, this collection offers a wide-ranging exploration of tradition, identity, and power in different parts of the Middle East.Seeking to overcome monolithic Western notions of women's life in "the traditional society," the essays in Part I reexamine the assumption that such societies leave little room for female participation.Part II focuses on the reconstruction of identities by women in Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the Occupied Territories. The authors examine the complex variables that contribute to the development of identities—including gender, class, and ethnicity—in various Middle Eastern societies, questioning whether certain identities are more important to women than others. These essays also look at the issue of group identity formation versus the autonomy of the individual.Part III looks at the relationship between gender and power in everyday life in Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco, showing how power relations are constantly contested and renegotiated among family members and members of a community, between nations and between men and women.WIth its collection of enlightened and diverse contemporary perspectives on women in the Middle East, Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East is an important work that will have significant impact on the way we look at gender in traditional societies.

The articles in this special issue examine the relationship between gender identity and second language learning from a variety of perspectives, all of which share a basic grounding in sociocultural theories of learning and poststructural theories of language. (Re)constructing Gender in a New Voice presents a range of approaches to questions

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.

This anthology of provocative readings forces the reader to face the complexity of gender and its varied relationships to power. Themes include: social contexts of gender; gender socialization; embodiment; communication; sexuality; families; education; and paid work and unemployment.

Constructing and Reconstructing Gender is an excellent compendium of current research, and will be appealing and useful to those interested in gender issues in a wide variety of disciplines. This book cuts across disciplines and scholarly methods, drawing from many backgrounds, including Communication, Linguistics, English, Business, Law, and Psychology. The interweaving of rhetorical, critical, phenomenological, and statistical methods gives readers a multifaceted analysis of gender. At the same time that this book shows the value of gender research in provoking new currents of thought, it also brings into focus two aspects of gender that are often confused: how gender operates as a cultural category that affects communication behavior, and how communication and language function to create gender categories.

Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a &“new Pygmalion&” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only &“L&’Eve future&” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.

Making Peace provides a fresh context for understanding gender relations in interwar Britain, seeing in the emergence of a powerful ideology of motherhood and a reemphasis on separate spheres for men and women a corollary to the political and economic restructuring designed to reestablish social order after World War I. The war had often been explained and justified to the British public by means of images that portrayed women as hostile or frightening—or as victims of sexual assault, as in the Belgian atrocity stories. These sexualized interpretations of war then shaped postwar understandings of gender, as psychiatrists, psychologists, and sexologists drew on metaphors of war to talk about relationships between men and women, likening any conflict between the sexes to the terrible chaos of the war years. Drawing on materials from posters to popular songs, from government reports to journalistic accounts, from memoirs and novels to diaries and letters, Making Peace is a penetrating analysis of how gendered and sexualized depictions of wartime expereinces compelled many Britons to seek in traditional gender arrangements the key to postwar order and security. In the interwar period, many feminists compromised their earlier positions in an effort to contribute to postwar recovery, and justified their demands—for birth control and family endowment, for example—in conservative terms that ultimately hampered their movement. Susan Kingsley Kent is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is also the author of Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (Princeton). Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Bringing together an international range of case studies and interviews with individuals who have had genital re/construction, Body, Migration, Re/constructive Surgeries explores the socio-cultural meanings of clitoral re/construction following female genital cutting (FGC), hymen reconstruction, trans and intersex bodily interventions; and cosmetic surgery. Drawing critical attention to how decisions around such surgeries are affected by social, economic and regulatory contexts that change over time and across spaces, it raises questions such as: How are bodies genderized through surgical interventions? How do such interventions express cultural context? How do women who have experienced female genital cutting respond to opportunities for clitoral reconstruction? How do female-to-male (FtM) trans people decide on how and where to undertake body modifications? What roles do cultural expectations and official regulations play in how people decide to have their bodies modified? Suggesting that conventional gender binaries are no longer adequate to understanding the quest for bodily interventions, this insightful volume seeks to give a greater voice to those engaged in gender body modification. It will appeal to students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Social Studies, Sexuality Studies and Cultural Studies.

With its focus particularly on men, The Gender Line offers an insightful overview of the construction of gender and the damaging effects of its stereotypes. Levit analyzes the ways in which law legitimizes the social segregation of the sexes through legal decisions regarding custody, employment, education, sexual harassment, and criminal law. In so doing, she illustrates the ways in which men's and women's oppressions are intertwined and how law molds the very definition of masculinity.