In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

Gender Equality on a Grand Tour. Politics and Institutions – the Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia explores the politics around the establishment, development and transformation of gender equality institutions in the Nordic countries (on the example of Sweden), in the former communist countries east of the Baltic Sea region (the example of Lithuania) and in the northwestern part of Russia. The authors analyze the interplay between the internationalization and Europeanization of gender equality on the one hand and national and local contexts on the other. Gender Equality on a Grand Tour also is the first study to explore the role of one of the leading transnational actors in the region - the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers - in gender equality institutionalization in the Baltic Sea region.

Rostami-Povey looks at how women have fought repression and challenged stereotypes, both within Afghanistan and in diasporas in Iran, Pakistan, the US and the UK. This book gets behind the media hype and presents a vibrant and diverse picture ofthese women's lives.

These essays chart major contributions to recent historiography. Carefully selected for their accessibility and accompanied by headnotes and study questions, the essays offer a clear and engaging introduction for the non-specialist. The introduction describes the emergence of gender as a subject of historical investigation and in ten essays, historians explore the meanings and significance of gender in American history since 1890. The volume shows how the interpretation of gender expands and revises our understanding of significant issues in twentieth-century history, such as work, labour protest, sexuality, consumption and social welfare. It offers new perspectives on visual representations and explores the politics of historical subjects and the politics of our own historical revisions.

Researching War provides a unique overview of varied feminist contributions to the study of war through case studies from around the world. Written by well-respected scholars, each chapter explicitly showcases the role of feminist methodological, ethical and political commitments in the research process. Designed to be useful for teaching also, the book provides insight into feminist research practices for students and scholars wanting to further their understanding what it means to study war (and other issues) from a feminist perspective. To this end, every author follows a four-part structure in the presentation of their case study: outlining a research puzzle, explaining the chosen approach, describing the findings and, finally, offering a reflection on the feminist commitments that guided the research. This book: Provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on war by drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, peace research, postcolonial theory, queer studies, security studies, and women’s studies; Showcases a multiplicity of experiences with war and violence, emphasizing everyday experiences of war and violence with accounts from around the world; Challenges stereotypical accounts of women, violence, and war by pointing to contradictions and unexpected continuities as well as unexpected findings made possible by adopting a feminist perspective; Teases out linkages between various forms of political violence (against women, but increasingly also by women); Discusses theoretical and methodological innovation in feminist research on war. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Security Studies, Gender and Conflict, Women and War, Feminist International Relations and Research Methods.

Sexuality, Health and Human Rights surveys the rapid changes taking place at the start of the twenty-first century in the social, cultural, political and economic domains and their impact on sexuality, health and human rights.

Making Gender, Making War is a unique interdisciplinary edited collection which explores the social construction of gender, war-making and peacekeeping. It highlights the institutions and processes involved in the making of gender in terms of both men and women, masculinity and femininity. The "war question for feminism" marks a thematic red thread throughout; it is a call to students and scholars of feminism to take seriously and engage with the task of analyzing war. Contributors analyze how war-making is intertwined with the making of gender in a diversity of empirical case studies, organized around four themes: gender, violence and militarism; how the making of gender is connected to a (re)making of the nation through military practices; UN SCR 1325 and gender mainstreaming in institutional practices; and gender subjectivities in the organization of violence, exploring the notion of violent women and non-violent men.

The war on terror has been raging for many years now, and subsequently there is a growing body of literature examining the development, motivation and effects of this US-led aggression. Virtually absent from these accounts is an examination of the central role that gender, race, class and sexuality play in the war on terror. This lack of attention reflects a continued resistance by analysts to acknowledge and engage identity-related social issues as central elements within global politics. As this conflict spreads and deepens, it is more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are using the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced, classed and sexualized inter/national relations. This book examines the official war stories being told to the international community about why and against whom the war on terror is being waged. The book will benefit students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of international relations, women's studies and cultural studies.

From one of the world's leading authorities on animal behavior, the astonishing story of how the female brain drives the evolution of beauty in animals and humans Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to explain why the animal world abounds in stunning beauty, from the brilliant colors of butterflies and fishes to the songs of birds and frogs. He argued that animals have “a taste for the beautiful” that drives their potential mates to evolve features that make them more sexually attractive and reproductively successful. But if Darwin explained why sexual beauty evolved in animals, he struggled to understand how. In A Taste for the Beautiful, Michael Ryan, one of the world’s leading authorities on animal behavior, tells the remarkable story of how he and other scientists have taken up where Darwin left off and transformed our understanding of sexual selection, shedding new light on human behavior in the process. Drawing on cutting-edge work in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, as well as his own important studies of the tiny Túngara frog deep in the jungles of Panama, Ryan explores the key questions: Why do animals perceive certain traits as beautiful and others not? Do animals have an inherent sexual aesthetic and, if so, where is it rooted? Ryan argues that the answers to these questions lie in the brain—particularly of females, who act as biological puppeteers, spurring the development of beautiful traits in males. This theory of how sexual beauty evolves explains its astonishing diversity and provides new insights about the degree to which our own perception of beauty resembles that of other animals. Vividly written and filled with fascinating stories, A Taste for the Beautiful will change how you think about beauty and attraction.

The local-level and international contributors of Shifting Positionalities encompass particular common themes through in-depth social science research in an effort to understand the meanings of the reformulation of state discourses and practices in this post-9/11 era. Current conjunctions between sexual, racial and ethnic identities—and the surveillance practices of those identities—calls for a thorough examination of the multiple and usually unexpected meaning-making practices adapted by individuals. Far from being predictable, the latter speaks to the possibility of individuals and communities utilizing techniques of actively resisting—as opposed to passively embracing—the policing of their daily lives. Shifting Positionalities: The Local and International Geo-Politics of Surveillance and Policing addresses surveillance and policing as practices and sites that speak to the various ways in which bio-power, displacement and resistance converge to constitute particular subjectivities across borders.