Producing Feminism

The book Our Bodies, Ourselves is a feminist success story. Selling more than four million copies since its debut in 1970, it has challenged medical dogmas about women’s bodies and sexuality, shaped health care policies, energized the reproductive rights movement, and stimulated medical research on women’s health. The book has influenced how generations of U.S. women feel about their bodies and health. Our Bodies, Ourselves has also had a whole life outside the United States. It has been taken up, translated, and adapted by women across the globe, inspiring more than thirty foreign language editions. Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women’s health. It was precisely the book’s distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

Offering a comparative analysis of feminist social movements in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism, this book offers a unique opportunity to examine how shifting gender relations interact with local identities to create new understandings of gender, the state, and strategies for resistance.

These original essays are planned to provide a coherent basis for an understanding of women's social and historical situation. This achieved by outlining the foundation of a systematic approach to an analysis of women's relationship to modes of production and reproduction within a materialist framework. The essays, each with a brief editorial introduction, deal with issues and perspectives brought increasingly to the fore in recent years, not only in the women's movement but in the social sciences generally. The articles are wide-ranging, covering such issues as patriarchy, paid and unpaid labour and the state. The centrality of two of the major themes - the family and the labour process - suggests that an understanding of women's situation is necessarily based on an analysis of the structures of production and reproduction. The authors' aim in producing Feminism and Materialism is to confront systematically theoretical issues current in the developing area of women's studies, while recognising that this must constitute a critique of existing theoretical frameworks. The book will be of interest to teachers and students in the social sciences and in women's studies, as well as to all those who wish to develop an understanding of what a materialist approach to feminism might be.

Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York's economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families. Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker. Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited—and this is the case for many—Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don't believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.

The history of Branching Out, Canada’s first national second-wave feminist magazine, is the story of an upstart publication from the prairies that was read from coast to coast. It is also a story of political activism and community building. When it ceased publication in 1980, Branching Out had reached more readers than any similar periodical. Feminist Acts is an in-depth examination of feminist publishing, written to bring more Canadian voices into conversations about women’s cultural production. A vital text of recuperation, the book draws on first-hand accounts from women who were there. It is a must-read for anyone interested in feminist activism, gender studies, Canadian cultural history, or publishing history.

"The story of the U.S. women's movement and television in the 1970s has been told primarily in two, often coordinating, ways: through feminist reform efforts that originated outside of the television industry and through feminist impact on on-air representations of women. Producing Feminism augments these accounts by exploring the effects of the women's movement on television production. Centering women who worked in television across a variety of occupations--including writers, producers, clerical staff, researchers, consultants, hosts, actors, and commentators--illustrates the changes they brought to workplace dynamics and protocols and norms of making television. These workers' interventions demonstrate the need to look at work processes and experiential qualities of television workplaces, along with onscreen representations that emerge from these sites of production, to understand more fully how feminism affected television. Research conducted for Producing Feminism features archival research and interviews; these materials reveal feminist influences on television that were not always visible to the public nor manifested onscreen, the conditions of television workplaces and experiences of women working in television, and the myriad strategies women workers used to reform the industry"--

This innovative new book brings together some of the leading writers on feminism to discuss their work and the key issues involved in feminist research. They draw on a range of different areas such as literature, film, law, television and history.

Examines feminist research methodology, including its constituting methods, theory, ontology, epistemology and ethics and politics, and analyses research issues relating to women, gender and feminism in Sri Lanka.