Producing Women

Producing Women examines the ways femininity is produced through new media. Michele White considers how women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures on sites like Etsy, and deploy technological processes to reshape their identities and digital characteristics. She studies the means through which women market traditional female roles, are viewed, and produce and restructure their gendered, raced, eroticized, and sexual identities. Incorporating a range of examples across numerous forms of media—including trash the dress wedding photography, Internet how-to instructions about zombie walk brides, nail polish blogging, DIY crafting, and reborn doll production—Producing Women elucidates women’s production cultures online, and the ways that individuals can critically study and engage with these practices.

Producing Women examines the ways femininity is produced through new media. Michele White considers how women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures on sites like Etsy, and deploy technological processes to reshape their identities and digital characteristics. She studies the means through which women market traditional female roles, are viewed, and produce and restructure their gendered, raced, eroticized, and sexual identities. Incorporating a range of examples across numerous forms of media—including trash the dress wedding photography, Internet how-to instructions about zombie walk brides, nail polish blogging, DIY crafting, and reborn doll production—Producing Women elucidates women’s production cultures online, and the ways that individuals can critically study and engage with these practices.

The field of popular music production is overwhelmingly male dominated. Here, Paula Wolfe discusses gendered notions of creativity and examines the significant under-representation of women in studio production. Wolfe brings an invaluable perspective as both a working artist-producer and as a scholar, thereby offering a new body of research based on interviews and first-hand observation. Wolfe demonstrates that patriarchal frameworks continue to form the backbone of the music industry establishment but that women’s work in the creation and control of sound presents a potent challenge to gender stereotyping, marginalisation and containment of women’s achievements that is still in evidence in music marketing practices and media representation in the digital era.

Producing Women's Poetry is the first specialist study to consider English-language poetry by women across the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Gillian Wright explores not only the forms and topics favoured by women, but also how their verse was enabled and shaped by their textual and biographical circumstances. She combines traditional literary and bibliographical approaches to address women's complex use of manuscript and print and their relationships with the male-generated genres of the traditional literary canon, as well as the role of agents such as scribes, publishers and editors in helping to determine how women's poetry was preserved, circulated and remembered. Wright focuses on key figures in the emerging canon of early modern women's writing, Anne Bradstreet, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch, alongside the work of lesser-known poets Anne Southwell and Mary Monck, to create a new and compelling account of early modern women's literary history.

Professor Beach's book on female scribes in twelfth-century Bavaria - a full-length study of the role of women copyists in the Middle Ages - is underpinned by the notion that the scriptorium was central to the intellectual revival of the Middle Ages and that women played a role in this renaissance. The author examines the exceptional quantity of evidence of female scribal activity in three different religious communities, pointing out the various ways in which the women worked - alone, with other women, and even alongside men - to produce books for monastic libraries, and discussing why their work should have been made visible, whereas that of other female scribes remains invisible. Beach's focus on manuscript production, and the religious, intellectual, social and economic factors which shaped that production, enables her to draw wide-ranging conclusions of interest not only to palaeographers but also to those interested in reading, literacy, religion and gender history.

This publication provides national statistical offices with detailed guidance on how to collect, process, disseminate and analyse data on violence against women. The role of statistical surveys in meeting policy objectives related to violence against women, the essential features of these surveys, the steps required to plan, organize and execute these surveys, the concepts that are essential for ensuring the reliable, valid and consistent measurement of women's experiences in accordance with core topics and a plan for data analysis and dissemination are laid out.

Using sources ranging from the famous 12th-century female practitioner, Trota of Salerno, through to the great tomes of Renaissance male physicians, this is a pioneering study challenging the common belief that, prior to the 18th century, men were never involved in any aspect of women's healthcare in Europe.