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Suggested Titles
Gender
by
Harriet Bradley
Gender issues continue to be a prominent concern of academics and policy-makers, and increasingly arise in various forms to be debated in the public sphere and popular media. But what exactly do we mean by gender? How can we best understand gender differences? How are current gender relations changing? What new paths are 'femininity' and 'masculinity' taking? What would it be like to live in a society in which differences of gender were transcended? In this new edition of her popular and highly lauded book, Harriet Bradley provides an introduction to the concept of gender and the different theoretical approaches which have developed within gender studies. Utilizing life narratives, she investigates processes of gendering in three important spheres of contemporary social life: production, reproduction and consumption. The book highlights the centrality of gender in everyday life and shows how thinking about gender is influenced by changing political contexts. As well as updating the discussion with the latest scholarship, political concerns and economic data, the new edition pays closer attention to intersectionality and hybrid identities, as well as exploring the complexities of contemporary relations of masculinity and femininity in the light of new feminist activities. This lively and accessible book will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in contemporary relations between women and men.
Call Number: HQ1075 .B73 2013
ISBN: 9780745661155
Gender Queer: a Memoir
by
Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns,thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographicalcomic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortablewith strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intenselycathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes themortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to comeout to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, andfacing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way toexplain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer ismore than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on genderidentity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates,friends, and humans everywhere.
Call Number: PN6727.K655 G46 2020
ISBN: 9781549304002
The Natural Mother of the Child
by
Krys Malcolm Belc
Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood--conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson--eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully align with Belc's own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one's life--childhood photos, birth certificates--and addresses his deep ambivalence about the "before" and "after" so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Call Number: Q759 .M328 2021
ISBN: 9781640094383
Separated by Their Sex
by
Mary Beth Norton
In Separated by Their Sex, Mary Beth Norton offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon's Rebellion by the actions of?and reactions to?Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia's governor. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the Civil War of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Even so, as late as 1690, Anglo-American women's political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged. Norton traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs to the age's cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury, a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women's links to husband, family, and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word "private" to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the immensely influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that women's participation in politics?even in political dialogues?was absurd. They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such "private" activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, Norton concludes, a newly gendered public-private division was firmly in place.