How can you build unshakable confidence and resilience in a world still filled with ignorance, inequality, and discrimination? The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook will teach you how to challenge internalized negative messages, handle stress, build a community of support, and embrace your true self. Resilience is a key ingredient for psychological health and wellness. It’s what gives people the psychological strength to cope with everyday stress, as well as major setbacks. For many people, stressful events may include job loss, financial problems, illness, natural disasters, medical emergencies, divorce, or the death of a loved one. But if you are queer or gender non-conforming, life stresses may also include discrimination in housing and health care, employment barriers, homelessness, family rejection, physical attacks or threats, and general unfair treatment and oppression—all of which lead to overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. So, how can you gain resilience in a society that is so often toxic and unwelcoming? In this important workbook, you’ll discover how to cultivate the key components of resilience: holding a positive view of yourself and your abilities; knowing your worth and cultivating a strong sense of self-esteem; effectively utilizing resources; being assertive and creating a support community; fostering hope and growth within yourself, and finding the strength to help others. Once you know how to tap into your personal resilience, you’ll have an unlimited well you can draw from to navigate everyday challenges. By learning to challenge internalized negative messages and remove obstacles from your life, you can build the resilience you need to embrace your truest self in an imperfect world.

Resource-poor people face multiple risks and disturbances across social, economic, health, political, and environmental spheres. Included among these are conflict, public health threats, corruption, climate change, and natural resource degradation. The concept of resilience provides a useful framework for considering potential solutions to these intersecting challenges. This is particularly the case in situations where structural problems and inequalities—such as chronic poverty and gender gaps—underlie persistent and recurring shocks. Growing evidence shows that men and women have different exposure to shocks and stressors, and different preferences and capacities in terms of their responses. This stems from gendered social, cultural, and institutional contexts that shape such factors as their livelihood activities, roles, and bargaining power. Importantly, these factors are intrinsically linked with women’s empowerment levels, including their ability to access resources and make strategic life choices to improve their overall wellbeing. Because shocks and stressors occur in local contexts with different power structures, institutions, and sociocultural norms, it is difficult to generalize the different ways men and women are affected and choose to respond. Men’s and women’s experiences and reactions largely depend on the types of overlapping shocks and stressors they are exposed to. This brief highlights some of the key gendered dimensions of resilience, drawing on evidence from the literature, including systematic reviews and global indicators, where available, as well as case-study examples that highlight important linkages. The evidence summarized is intended to guide the development and implementation of gender-sensitive resilience interventions focusing on key programming areas of interest to Feed the Future’s Center for Resilience.

Natural disasters push ordinary gender disparities to the extreme¿leaving women not only to deal with a catastrophe¿s aftermath, but also at risk for greater levels of domestic violence, displacement, and other threats to their security and well-being. Elaine Enarson presents a comprehensive assessment, encompassing both theory and practice, of how gender shapes disaster vulnerability and resilience.

In this short and provocative book, cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie develops a much-needed feminist account of neoliberalism. Highlighting the ways in which popular culture and the media actively produce and sustain the cultural imaginary for social polarization, she shows how there is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but to prioritize working life. She fiercely challenges the media gatekeepers who shape contemporary womanhood by means of exposure and public shaming, and pays particular attention to the endemic nature of anti-welfarism as it is addressed to women, thereby reducing the scope for feminist solidarity. In this theoretically rich and deep analysis of current cultural processes, McRobbie introduces a series of concepts including 'visual media governmentality' and the urging of women into work as 'contraceptive employment'. Foregrounding a triage of ideas as the 'perfect-imperfect-resilience' McRobbie conveys some of the key means by which consumer capitalism attempts to manage the threats posed by the new feminisms. She proposes that 'resilience' emerges as a compromise, as hard-edged neoliberalism proffers the option of a return to liberal feminism. A lively and devastating critique, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience offers a much-needed wake-up call. It is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, media, sociology, and women's and gender studies.

Although climate change affects everybody it is not gender neutral. It has significant social impacts and magnifies existing inequalities such as the disparity between women and men in their vulnerability and ability to cope with this global phenomenon. This new textbook, edited by one of the authors of the seminal Women and the Environment in the Third World: Alliance for the Future (1988) which first exposed the links between environmental degradation and unequal impacts on women, provides a comprehensive introduction to gender aspects of climate change. Over 35 authors have contributed to the book. It starts with a short history of the thinking and practice around gender and sustainable development over the past decades. Next it provides a theoretical framework for analyzing climate change manifestations and policies from the perspective of gender and human security. Drawing on new research, the actual and potential effects of climate change on gender equality and women's vulnerabilities are examined, both in rural and urban contexts. This is illustrated with a rich range of case studies from all over the world and valuable lessons are drawn from these real experiences. Too often women are primarily seen as victims of climate change, and their positive roles as agents of change and contributors to livelihood strategies are neglected. The book disputes this characterization and provides many examples of how women around the world organize and build resilience and adapt to climate change and the role they are playing in climate change mitigation. The final section looks at how far gender mainstreaming in climate mitigation and adaptation has advanced, the policy frameworks in place and how we can move from policy to effective action. Accompanied by a wide range of references and key resources, this book provides students and professionals with an essential, comprehensive introduction to the gender aspects of climate change.

Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation is an introductory resource for development and humanitarian practitioners working with populations at risk of disasters and other impacts of climate change.

Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change presents the voices of women from every continent, women who face vastly different climate events and challenges. The book heralds a new way of understanding climate change that incorporates gender justice and human rights for all.

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title In often mundane but sometimes quite obvious ways, persons belonging to groups routinely threatened with harm on the basis of gender and sexuality suffer restrictions to choice and action, impairing autonomy. Gender Violence: Resistance, Resilience, and Autonomy shows that resistance to, and cultivating resiliency within, a culture of gender violence is key to fostering autonomy. Building on decades of research philosophically interrogating autonomy and its limits, and with a martial arts background spanning over twenty-five years, Professor Burrow develops a novel approach to autonomy development under everyday threats of violence. Appealing to empirical research to ground its philosophical analysis, the theory presented in this book establishes that cultivating self-confidence through self-defense training is a significant strategy contributing to resistance and resilience under threats of violence and hence, autonomy development.

One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self–proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close–knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post–slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother–in–law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” “Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned–together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.” ––Los Angeles Times

First collection of essays by queer scholars with working-class backgrounds.