Recommendations based on "Intimate Selving in Arab Families Gender, Self, and Identity"

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By DK

Exploring more than 100 of the most important ideas, organizations, and events to have defined the feminist movement, this guide is an essential introduction to feminism.The latest entry in DK's bestselling Big Ideas series, The Feminism Book is a complete study of feminism. Trace the subject from its origins, through the suffrage campaigns of the late 19th century, to recent developments such as the Everyday Sexism Project and the #MeToo movement. Examine the ideas that underpin feminist thought through crucial figures, from Simone de Beauvoir to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and discover the wider social, cultural, and historical context of their impact. Find out who campaigned for birth control, when the term "intersectionality" was coined, and what "post-feminism" really means in this comprehensive book.Using the Big Ideas series' trademark combination of authoritative, accessible text and bold graphics, the most significant concepts and theories have never been easier to understand. Packed with inspirational quotations, eye-catching infographics, and clear flowcharts, The Feminism Book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in the subject.

By Amanda Montell

“As funny as it is informative, this book will have you laughing out loud while you contemplate the revolutionary power of words.” —Camille Perri, author of The Assistants and When Katie Met CassidyA brash, enlightening, and wildly entertaining feminist look at gendered language and the way it shapes us.The word bitch conjures many images, but it is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean “a female canine,” bitch didn’t refer to women at all—it originated as a gender-neutral word for “genitalia.” A perfectly innocuous word devolving into an insult directed at females is the case for tons more terms, including hussy, which simply meant “housewife”; and slut, which meant “an untidy person” and was also used to describe men. These are just a few of history’s many English slurs hurled at women.Amanda Montell, reporter and feminist linguist, deconstructs language—from insults, cursing, gossip, and catcalling to grammar and pronunciation patterns—to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to keep women and other marginalized genders from power. Ever wonder why so many people are annoyed when women speak with vocal fry or use like as filler? Or why certain gender-neutral terms stick and others don’t? Or where stereotypes of how women and men speak come from in the first place?Montell effortlessly moves between history, science, and popular culture to explore these questions—and how we can use the answers to affect real social change. Her irresistible humor shines through, making linguistics not only approachable but downright hilarious and profound. Wordslut gets to the heart of our language, marvels at its elasticity, and sheds much-needed light on the biases that shadow women in our culture and our consciousness.

By Flo Perry

We talk about feminism in the workplace and we talk about dating after #MeToo, but women's own patriarchal conditioning can be the hardest enemy to defeat. When it comes to our sex lives, few of us are free of niggling fears and body image insecurities. Rather than enjoying and exploring our bodies uninhibited, we worry about our bikini lines, bulging tummies and whether we're doing it 'right'.Flo broaches everything from faking it to consent, stress to kink, and how losing your virginity isn't so different to eating your first chocolate croissant. Her mission is to get more people talking openly about what they do and don't want from every romantic encounter.

By Angela Carter

Draws on de Sade's embodiments of women's two roles, Justine and Juliette, and on more contemporary models to argue that sexuality is a mode of power politics as well as a vital way to advance relationships admitting of neither conqueror nor conquered. Reprint.

By Gerda Lerner

A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.

By Lauren Fournier

Autotheory--the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography--as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.In the 2010s, the term "autotheory" began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.

By Julia Kristeva

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

By Alenka Zupancic

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.” Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

By Mari Ruti

In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the ideological divisions that have animated queer theory during the last decade, paying particular attention to the field's rejection of dominant neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, and self-actualization. More specifically, she focuses on queer negativity in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and on the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz. Ruti highlights the ways in which queer theory's desire to opt out of normative society rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely innovative ways at the same time as she resists turning antinormativity into a new norm. This wide-ranging and thoughtful book maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory in order to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

By Simone de Beauvoir

Political Writings offers an abundance of newly translated essays by Simone de Beauvoir that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel. Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.