In The Feminine Mode

This provocative book seeks to redress inaccuracies in Western perceptions of gender relations in Southeast Asia by bringing to the fore the area's ethnic and cultural variance and showing how women and men explain the informal and psychological dimensions of relationships as vital in holding family, neighbourhood and kinship ties together. Although there are differences between male and female perceptions of sex roles in society, women perceive their situation as disadvantaged rather than less significant. Male-female interpretations of power and status tend to converge usually towards the understanding that the contributions of men and women are equally important in the formation of family and society.

Feminine Look shows how the Lacanian concept of sexuation makes possible a new account of the relationship among feminism, psychoanalysis, and spectatorship. Whereas previous studies have tended to ask how spectatorship may be influenced by sexual difference, Jennifer Friedlander asks how particular spectatorial encounters may engender different "sexuated" responses. In so doing, she traces a fresh path through Freud's account of the relationship between visual perception and sexual difference and rereads Freud's fable of castration anxiety, suggesting that sexual identity arises as a response to the symbolic order's indifference to the subject's need for a solid identity. She examines provocative and controversial artistic images by Jamie Wagg, Marcus Harvey, and Sally Mann to demonstrate how images not only create and embody social practices but also precipitate viewer anxieties and pleasures.

This book presents a rich collection of Betty A. Reardon’s writing on gender studies, sexism and the war system, and human security from a feminist perspective. Betty A. Reardon is a pioneer of gender studies who, as a feminist, identified the structural relationship between sexism and the war system and, as a scholar, a shift from national to human security. As a pioneer in contemporary theories on gender and peace, Betty A. Reardon has continually developed research on the integral relationship between patriarchy and war, and has been an outspoken advocate of gender issues as an essential aspect of peace studies, of problems of gender equity as the subject of peace research, and of gender experience as a crucial factor in defining and attaining human security. Her work evolved in the context of international women’s movements for human rights, peace and the United Nations, and is widely drawn upon by activists and educators in order to introduce a gender perspective to peace studies and education and a peace perspective to women’s studies.

“Rabuzzi rejects the status quo, presenting viable, often spiritual, alternatives to prevailing high-tech, patriarchal models of childbirth” (Booklist). Rabuzzi, author of The Sacred and the Feminine and Motherself, contends that childbearing has been denigrated, denied, and devalued. This book is intended to help women rename, re-ritualize, reinterpret, and reframe childbearing for themselves and their partners. “A lovely book. . . . It is a book for anyone wishing to reexamine and reclaim birth’s potential for sacredness.” —Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage “Excellent.” —The Reader’s Review

Jones examines men's and women's relation to fashion in eighteenth-century France and shows how shopping and fashion developed as specifically feminine associations.

First published in 2001, this book retraces the chronological history of the Italian Diaspora community in Britain from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present. The author describes the immigrants’ way of life, patterns of occupation, gender relations and modes of integration in the host country. In addition, the book focuses on the role of religion, an institution which has traditionally reinforced both Italian cultural identity and unequal gender relations. Until now, most ethnic studies have been carried out on racialized minorities - those with physical differences - and they have generally failed to emphasize the gender relations within minority communities.

The novel of adultery is a nineteenth-century form about the experience of women, produced almost exclusively by men. Bill Overton's study is the first to address the gender implications of this form, and the first to write its history. The opening chapter defines the terms 'adultery' and 'novel of adultery', and discusses how the form arose in Continental Europe, but failed to appear in Britain. Successive chapters deal with its development in France, and with examples from Russia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Portugal.