Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in Gender Studies

Lust. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Wrath. Envy. Pride. These so-called ‘deadly sins’, consecrated as an essential pillar of divinity, have been used by the patriarchy to control women in particular and keep them small throughout our history. What would happen if we stopped trying to be ‘good’? In On Our Best Behaviour, Elise Loehnen looks at the ways in which women have been penned by the fake morality of the sins, and how we find ourselves complicit in denying ourselves a full existence for fear of crossing some sort of line.

All too often the focus of mainstream feminism is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. Meeting basic needs is a feminist issue. Food insecurity, the living wage and access to education are feminist issues. The fight against racism, ableism and transmisogyny are all feminist issues. White feminists often fail to see how race, class, sexual orientation and disability intersect with gender. How can feminists stand in solidarity as a movement when there is a distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?

How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do: a supposedly private act laden with public meaning, a personal preference shaped by outside forces, a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.

As a child, Isabel Allende watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one's sexuality. 

On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide. She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her.

When her body began to change at 11 years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defences she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. 

The Sexual Politics of Meat is Carol Adams’ inspiring and controversial exploration of the interplay between contemporary society’s ingrained cultural misogyny and its obsession with meat and masculinity. First published in 1990, the book has continued to change the lives of tens of thousands of people into the second decade of the 21st century.

A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation. Katra Sadatgani. A tiny village in western Uttar Pradesh. A community bounded by tradition and custom; where young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them. It was an ordinary night when two girls, Padma and Lalli, went missing. The next day, their bodies were found - hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied.

Transitioning is an alignment of the invisible and the physical. It is truth rising to the surface. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition - a part of our experience as a conscious being, no matter who we are. As time goes on, we all develop as people. None of us ever becomes someone else entirely - regardless of how we identify – but nor do we stay the same forever. We all transition. It’s what binds us, not what separates us.

Have you ever been told to smile more, been teased about your accent or had your name pronounced incorrectly? If so, you’ve probably already faced bias in your everyday life. We like to believe that we are all fair-minded and egalitarian, but we all carry biases that we might not even be aware of. We might believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racial tension and inequality is pernicious and pervasive. We might believe that gender inequality is a thing of the past, but it is still ubiquitous.

Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice, Tijuana, was, until recently, no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego. But then something changed. Over the past 10 years, Mexico’s third-largest city became one of the world’s most dangerous. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year, or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast. When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013, rather than viewing them in isolation, he discovered that they could be understood only as one symptom among many.

An inclusive and empowering manifesto for change in women’s healthcare – exploring the systemic and deep rooted sexism within medicine, and offering actionable ways for women to advocate for ourselves and others and get the diagnosis and treatment we need. Have you ever been to a doctor and felt like you were being fobbed off or ignored? Did they belittle or overlook your concerns about your health? Ever been told you’re just ‘hormonal’? You’re not alone.

Acclaimed writer Elif Shafak writes a letter to Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand after the Christchurch attack. Actress Yasmine AlMassri pens a poem about war for her mother. Activist and TV presenter June Sarpong addresses designer Diane Von Furstenberg. From Women to the World is more than a simple collection of letters - it is an audiobook that shows a new model of leadership based on emotional intelligence and demonstrates how we have the wisdom to inspire, motivate and reinvent our world.