"Survival," writes Mamphela Ramphele, "is a stronger force than the fear of offending others." Born black and female in apartheid-ruled South Africa, Ramphele went on to become one of the most distinguished women on the African continent--a prominent...

The New Biography looks at the life stories of eight famous women in nineteenth-century France who became public figures even though they lived in a society that did not encourage women to speak out publicly. All of these women—activists, writers, and...

In Wedded to the Land? Mary N. Layoun offers a critical commentary on the idea of nationalism in general and on specific attempts to formulate alternatives to the concept in particular. Narratives surrounding three geographically and temporally different...

Over the last twenty years, much critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted his homosexuality. This not only is presented as a dynamic underlying Mann's creative work, but also is the supposed reason for the theme of guilt and redemption that...

Focusing on the early Modern and Victorian periods, the author finds covert revolutionaries in four female practitioners of a strategy she calls creative negativity. She opens up for inspection the lives and creative endeavors of poet-photographer Julia...

"'Are women's orgasms more intense than men's?' 'Would you let a woman see you with suspicious stains on your trousers?' 'When and how did you lose your virginity?' 'How many times can you come, without leaving the room?' 'Do you believe that there...

The only study of gay male history covering the United States since World War I.Based on hundreds of interviews, new and classic texts, and little-known archival sources, an award-winning writer offers the first narrative history to consider signal...

Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the...

Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar expose the secret of female genital mutilation, a practice that affects one hundred million of the world’s women. New Introductions by the Authors.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called "women's secrets," by which they meant female sexuality and generation. At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began...

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the...

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore bell hooks' electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection...

Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn’t get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of...

"At last! A critical look at feminist schisms that doesn't trash either side. Chancer's analysis of the sexuality vs. sexism splits is excellent and also makes for wonderful reading. I particularly liked her ideas for a 'third wave' in feminism."—Judith...

Since the mid-1980s, Simon Watney has been one of the leading voices in the international field of HIV/AIDS education. His monthly column on AIDS in Britain’s Gay Times is the longest-running column of its kind in Europe, and he is actively involved in...

The image of the movie-obsessed gay man is a widely circulating and readily recognizable element of the contemporary cultural landscape. Using psychoanalytic theory as his guide while inflecting it with insights from both film theory and queer theory,...

"Pays an impressive tribute to the new renaissance in African-American literature."--New York Times Book Review"The cultural and literary achievements of black American women are examined and celebrated in some 20 enjoyable, erudite essays by prominent...

In the spring of 1889, Brooklyn's premier newspaper, the Daily Eagle, printed a series of articles that detailed a history of midnight hearses and botched operations performed by a scalpel-eager female surgeon named Dr. Mary Dixon-Jones. The ensuing...

A Stanford University Press classic.