A Feminist Formations Reader – serie

This collection of essays traces the evolution of feminist pedagogy over the past twenty years, exploring both its theoretical and its practical dimensions. Feminist pedagogy is defined as a set of epistemological assumptions, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships grounded in feminist theory. To apply this philosophy in the classroom, the editors maintain that feminist scholars must critically engage in dialogue and reflection about both what and how they teach, as well as how who they are affects how they teach. In identifying the themes and tensions within the field and in questioning why feminist pedagogy is particularly challenging in some educational environments, these articles illustrate how and why feminist theory is practiced in all kinds of classrooms. In exploring feminist pedagogy in all its complexities, the contributors identify the practical applications of feminist theory in teaching practices, classroom dynamics, and student-teacher relationships.This volume will help readers develop theoretically grounded classroom practices informed by the advice and experience of fellow practitioners and feminist scholars.

Once focusing solely on reproduction and reproductive matters, the study of women's health has expanded to include cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and osteoporosis. The United States has established an office dedicated to researching women's health issues, and the Women's Health Initiative has begun collecting data on the prevention of diseases common among women. Yet the health care issues affecting diverse groups of women have remained underfunded and understudied. Diversity and Women's Health calls attention to this glaring discrepancy and presents cutting-edge research on women's health from a feminist perspective. The contributors argue that the health issues specific to lesbians, elderly women, women of color, immigrant women, and disabled women must become a central part of the broader conversation on women's health in the United States. Essays in this collection highlight the disparities in diagnosis and treatment among women because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and age from both medical and women's studies perspectives.In reviewing the history of feminist scholarship on health care, the contributors to this volume show how bringing a feminist perspective to biomedical research will address the health care needs of marginalized groups in the United States.

Spanning geographical, cultural, and methodological boundaries, the essays in Being and Becoming Visible examine female representation in a variety of performative and visual media. Olga M. Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Feve situate the disciplines of visual culture and performance studies within two conceptual frameworks-multicultural and feminist-through the overarching thematic trope of visibility. The contributors offer a mix of sociohistorical, ethnographic, ideological, postcolonial, and cultural approaches to the study of female representation in performance, visual, and consumer cultures. They examine curatorship, mythological representation of women, the interrelationship of mother and child, domestic gender roles, domestic abuse, and indigenous female representation. The volume includes case studies related to such diverse genres and media as theater, cinema, painting, television, performance activism, and photography from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.Instructors in feminist, cultural, and media studies who are looking for global perspectives will find that this fresh and provocative volume encourages students to see new connections among a variety of trends in contemporary scholarship.

Masculinity, as both performed and studied, continues to be a particularly productive site for understanding cultural dynamics. Contemporary work within women's and gender studies programs recognizes that potential, regularly exploring masculine, bisexual, and transgendered subjectivities in the classroom and in scholarship. This collection of essays on masculinity offers a unique perspective on the topic by featuring articles ranging from early work in biological science and gender behavior to contemporary sociocultural readings of feminist pedagogy, gender violence, and global masculinities. The anthology provides specific insight into critical conversations on masculinity as they have unfolded over time and in the pages of Feminist Formations. Structured around highly readable essays on a wide range of topics and disciplines, it provides a basic introduction to the question of masculinity before moving on to studies of masculinity, science, and the body. The volume closes with two parts that discuss performing masculinity in global and domestic contexts.This survey of masculinity relates to a number of diverse subject areas, including biology, film, literature, economics, and political science. As such, the book is ideal both as a primary text in women's and gender studies courses and as a reference for faculty and students outside the discipline applying gender issues to their teaching and research.

Generations of feminists have linked women's empowerment, autonomy, and oppression to issues involving work. Most conflated women's economic and political clout with gender equity, arguing that increasing women's access to and leadership in the public workplace is crucial to the success of the feminist project. But recent debates about women's continued inability to gain equality in the workplace raise the need for new approaches to teaching about gender and employment. Getting In Is Not Enough responds to the challenge. Drawn from almost two decades of the Feminist Formations journal, the essays in this book critically examine assumptions about access and the ways in which women affect and are affected by work in three major spheres: economic, social, and political. Getting In Is Not Enough focuses on how access-based feminism, a term developed by Colette Morrow and Terri Ann Fredrick, has both failed and succeeded in achieving equity and justice for women and looks at how transnational feminism has addressed these concerns using a global, fundamentally transformative approach.The contributors consider a wide range of issues, from an examination of the male/female wage gap that starts when girls are teenagers, to policewomen in Persian Gulf countries, to Latinas' politics, to Aboriginal health care workers, to secretarial work, and to feminist activism in Cuban hip hop.