Introducing Women’s and Gender Studies approaches feminism in terms of major contributions, debates, and themes and focuses on the connectivity of these debates. The authors introduce a concept (knowledges, bodies, identities, equalities, representations, places, affects) and contextualize it with an introductory essay. The readings associated with each essay—all of them contemporary--take varied perspectives on each topic (e.g. identity and conformity; identity and nonconformity; identity’s relation to biology; identity and sexuality, etc). The readings and introductory essays demonstrate how the topics are interconnected, and allow students to make connections. The companion website will contain teaching tips, bonus readings, and other pedagogical materials.

Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies is a text-reader that offers instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women’s and gender studies. This book highlights major concepts that organize the diverse work in this field: Knowledges, Identities, Equalities, Bodies, Places, and Representations. Its focus on "the everyday" speaks to the importance this book places on students understanding the taken-for granted circumstances of their daily lives. Precisely because it is not the same for everyone, the everyday becomes the ideal location for cultivating students’ intellectual capacities as well as their political investigations and interventions. In addition to exploring each concept in detail, each chapter includes up to five short recently published readings that illuminate an aspect of that concept. Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies explores the idea that "People are different, and the world isn’t fair," and engages students in the inevitably complicated follow-up question, "Now that we know, how shall we live?"

The second volume of Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes of the expansive knowledge project known as Women's and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume's chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in and through this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices. In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions and trajectories of dialogue within the field. The ongoing aim of Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies, both in the original volume and this entirely fresh extension, is to trace and expose important paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the field-from its high theory to its casual conversations-that rely on these terms. Forging collective conversation and intellectual community from its thoughtful and critical lines of inquiry, the second volume of Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies remains bracingly original and full of fresh insight. It provides a perfect complement for Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses offered in Women's and Gender Studies and related fields.

Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.

Drawing upon anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives, this volume provides a unique insight into women’s domestic consumption. The contributors argue that domestic consumption represents an important lens through which to examine the everyday production and reproduction of socio-economic relations. Through a variety of case studies (such as gambling, wedding day consumption and bedroom décor), the essays explore and reconsider the nature of public and private spaces, and the subsequent nature of domestic space - often by challenging traditional notions of what constitutes ’the domestic’. The volume demonstrates the broad range of experiences that domestic consumption offers women and reveals some of the complex meanings and motivations underpinning women’s consumption practices.

Bringing together a selection of some of the author's key papers on language and gender, this book provides an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on conversational data and on single sex friendship groups.

A highly accessible overview of the central themes of women's studies, suitable for introductory reading in undergraduate courses or for a more general audience's introduction to the meaning of feminism and its relevance as a progressive force in society. The authors tackle six broad topics that dominate the field and are key to understanding women's experiences and prospects: women's bodies, anger & desires, sexuality, internal backlash, feminist methods, & identity politics. The authors consider why there is a resistance to the development of American feminism and women's studies in the academy, with their continuing representation of marginalized, excluded, and silenced voices.

Why are we so insistent that women and men are different? This introduction to gender provides a fascinating, readable exploration of how society divides people into feminine women and masculine men. Gender and Everyday Life explores gender as a way of seeing women and men as not just biological organisms, but as people shaped by their everyday social world. Examining how gender has been understood and lived in the past; and how it is understood and done differently by different cultures and groups within cultures; Mary Holmes considers the strengths and limitations of different ways of thinking and learning to ‘do’ gender. Key sociological and feminist ideas about gender are covered from Christine Pisan to Mary Wollstonecraft; and from symbolic interactionism to second wave feminism through to the work of Judith Butler. Gender and Everyday Life illustrates gender with a range of familiar and contemporary examples: everything from nineteenth century fashions in China and Britain, to discussions of what Barbie can tell us about gender in America, to the lives of working women in Japan. This book will be of great use and interest to students to gender studies, sociology and feminist theory.

Section 1 – Setting the Stage: What Does it Mean to Be a Woman and a Man? Section 2 – Forging Femininities and Masculinities Through Media and Material Cultures Section 3 – Sexualizing Women and Men Section 4 – Body and Soul Section 5 – Community, Families and Parenting Section 6 – Gendered Economies and Waged Workers Section 7 – the Law, Governance, Politics and Public Policy Section 8 – Changing the World: Activism for Equity References

Book clubs are everywhere these days. And women talk about the clubs they belong to with surprising emotion. But why are the clubs so important to them? And what do the women discuss when they meet? To answer questions like these, Elizabeth Long spent years observing and participating in women's book clubs and interviewing members from different discussion groups. Far from being an isolated activity, she finds reading for club members to be an active and social pursuit, a crucial way for women to reflect creatively on the meaning of their lives and their place in the social order.