Gender, Culture and Global Politics – serie

Around the world, women have long been on the frontlines, protesting war and military forces. The essays in this collection, from both scholars and activists, explore the experiences of local women's groups that have developed to fight war, militarization, political domination, and patriarchy throughout the world. The writings in this collection cover a range of genres from memoir and historical accounts to critical essays. What holds the writings together is an urgency to reflect on and analyze women's activism on the frontlines-from Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Kosovo, and rural India to Serbia, Croatia, Okinawa, Israel, U.S. prisons, and the racialized American South.

The editors are committed to destroying perceptions and stereotypes of third world women as passive victims who need to be "liberated" by Western feminists. The essays address cases in which women have challenged and resisted the political formations-nationalist struggles, revolutions, religious fundamentalist practices, and authoritarian regimes-that shape their daily lives. Each critic presents a close reading of the circumstances under which the feminist writers and film-makers.

The contributors to this volume were born in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong; they have been immigrants, foreign students, settlers, permanent residents, citizens, and-above all-"travelers." They are both geographic inhabitants of various overseas diaspora Chinese communities as well as figurative inhabitants of imagined heterogeneous and hybrid communities. Their migratory histories are here presented as an interdisciplinary collection of texts in distinctive voices: law professor, journalist, historian, poet, choreographer, film scholar, tai-chi expert, translator, writer, literary scholar.

The triangle of empowerment is how this volume's editors describe the three sets of actors involved in women's collective struggles in the political arena: the women's movement, feminist politicians, and feminist civil servants. Original case studies from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean analyze the political struggles women are waging to make their voices heard and to place women's issues on the agenda in different societies.

Seeking to extend existing scholarship on gender and colonialism and on women and American religion, this cross-cultural study examines the work of American missionary women in South Asia at several levels. A primary concern of the study is to historicize the interventions of these women and situate them within the dual contexts of the sending society and the receiving culture. It focuses on missionaries Isabella Thoburn and Ida Scudder, who founded some of the premier women's colleges and hospitals in British colonial India. The book also draws upon the narratives and reminiscences of South Asian women, now in their seventies, who attended such institutions in the 1940s, and whose voices texture our understanding of American women's missionary work in "Other" cultures.

The contributors to this volume were born in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong; they have been immigrants, foreign students, settlers, permanent residents, citizens, and-above all-"travelers." They are both geographic inhabitants of various overseas diaspora Chinese communities as well as figurative inhabitants of imagined heterogeneous and hybrid communities. Their migratory histories are here presented as an interdisciplinary collection of texts in distinctive voices: law professor, journalist, historian, poet, choreographer, film scholar, tai-chi expert, translator, writer, literary scholar.