Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

In The Gender Politics of Development Shirin Rai provides a comprehensive assessment of how gender politics has emerged and developed in post-colonial states. In chapters on key issues of nationalism and nation-building, the third wave of democratization and globalization and governance, Rai argues that the gendered way in which nationalist statebuilding occured created deep fissures and pressures for development. She goes on to show how women have engaged with institutions of governance in developing countries, looking in particular at political participation, deliberative democracy, representation, leadership and state feminism. Through this engagement, Rai claims, vital new political spaces have been created. Though Rai focuses in-depth on how these debates have played out in India, the book's argument is highly relevant for politics across the developing world. This is a unique and compelling synthesis of gender politics with ideas about development from an authoritative figure in the field.

The relationship between gender and governance has too often been neglected in both theoretical and empirical work. Until very recently, most influential political thought has been built around a conceptual distinction between the public realm of politics, military affairs, and administration, and the private realm of family and domestic life. Women s role, in a wide range of traditions and in theoretical work influenced by them, has typically been associated with the private realm, and men s role with the public realm. The public/private distinction has been thoroughly criticized as being in many ways misleading and untenable. Nonetheless, it continues to influence both theoretical and empirical work, with the result that women s efforts to gain a voice in governance have often been ignored. The papers in this volume aim to set the record straight. They advance a theoretical structure, both positive and normative, within which the question of gendered governance may usefully be pursued. They also analyze some current developments that indicate many ways in which women are actively participating in governance, in both government and the institutions of civil society, and the obstacles that remain. The essays in this volume are the outcome of a year long collaborative exploration of the multiple factors that influence the process of engendering governance in complex societies, in particular the changing roles of various actors including women s movements, the state and civil society.

Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

This book theorizes the idea of gender itself as an apparatus of power developed to reproduce life and labor. From its invention in 1950s psychiatry to its appropriation by feminism, demography and public policy, the book examines how gender has been deployed to optimize production and reproduction over the past sixty years.

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

Goes beyond the category of transgender to question the need for gender classification Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. He examines four areas where we need to re-think our sex-classification systems: sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage. For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis’ recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people.

In the early 1970s, when women's history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume. Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women's lives, and men's. These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women's studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women's history.

Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.