Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science PDF Author: Kirsten Leng
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171323X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Kirsten Leng restores the work of female sexologists to the forefront of the history of sexology. While male researchers who led the practice of early-twentieth-century sexology viewed women and their sexuality as objects to be studied, not as collaborators in scientific investigation, Leng pinpoints nine German and Austrian "women sexologists" and "female sexual theorists" to reveal how sex, gender, and sexuality influenced the field of sexology itself. Leng's book makes it plain that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge but also made significant and influential interventions in the field. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science provides readers with an opportunity to rediscover and engage with the work of these pioneers. Leng highlights sexology's empowering potential for women, but also contends that in its intersection with eugenics, the narrative is not wholly celebratory. By detailing gendered efforts to understand and theorize sex through science, she reveals the cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Ultimately, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science helps readers to understand these women's ideas in all their complexity in order to appreciate their unique place in the history of sexology.

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science PDF Author: Kirsten Leng
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Introduction : women and sexology : knowledge, possibilities, and problematic legacies -- The emergence of sexology in early twentieth century Germany -- As natural as eating, drinking, and sleeping : redefining the female sex -- Challenging the limits of sex : envisioning new gendered subjectivities and sexualities -- Troubling normal, taking on patriarchy : criticizing male (hetero)sexuality -- The erotics of racial regeneration : eugenics, maternity, and sexual -- New social and moral values will have to prevail : negotiating crisis and opportunity in the First World War -- Fluid gender, rigid sexuality : constrained potential in the post-war period

Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics PDF Author: Kate Millett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541724
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

S/He Brain

S/He Brain PDF Author: Robert Nadeau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313024073
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
During the 1960s, Margaret Mead's argument that gender identity is a product of learning in particular cultural contexts was incorporated into the sex/gender system in feminist theory. In this system, sex refers to physiological differences in the body and gender refers to learned sex-specific bodies to be viewed as separate and distinct from gender-neutral minds. In S/He Brain, Nadeau demonstrates that the sex/gender systemis not some arcane bit of academic jargon that has no impact on our daily lives. It is the greatest source of division and conflict in the politics of our sexual lives for a now obvious reason: the brains of men and women are not the same, and the differences have behavioral consequences. Further, he argues that an improved understanding of the relatinship between sex and gender could enlarge the bases for meaningful dialogue between men and women and lead to new standards for sexual equality that is more realistic and humane than the current standard. The individual most responsible for legitimating the modern distinction between sex and gender was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. According to the Mead doctrine, gender identity is almost entirely a product of learning in different cultural contexts, and sex, or biological reality, is not a determinant of this identity. The assumption that gender identity is learned in sexless, or gender-neutral, minds separate and distinct from sex-specific bodies legitimated the sex/gender system that has been foundational to feminist theory since the mid 1970s. In this system, sex refers to physiological differences in the domain of the body and gender to learned behavior in the domain of mind. Since this two-domain distinction obviated the connection between biological reality and gender identity, it allowed gender identity to be viewed as scripted or socially constructed by cultural narratives (stories, myths, legends, and the like) invented by men to control and oppress women. In ^IS/He Brain^R, Nadeau demonstrates that the sex/gender system is not in accord with biological reality for now obvious reasons—the brains of men and women are not the same, and the differences have behavioral consequences. Yet the intent of the book is to serve the cause of full sexual equality and not to escalate the gender war. Nadeau attempts to accomplish this by demonstrating that an improved understanding of the relationship between sex and gender can not only enlarge the bases for meaningful communication between men and women. It could also serve as the basis for a new and improved standard of sexual equality that eliminates the grossly unfair treatment of women sanctioned by the current standard.

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science PDF Author: Kirsten Leng
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150171323X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Kirsten Leng restores the work of female sexologists to the forefront of the history of sexology. While male researchers who led the practice of early-twentieth-century sexology viewed women and their sexuality as objects to be studied, not as collaborators in scientific investigation, Leng pinpoints nine German and Austrian "women sexologists" and "female sexual theorists" to reveal how sex, gender, and sexuality influenced the field of sexology itself. Leng's book makes it plain that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge but also made significant and influential interventions in the field. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science provides readers with an opportunity to rediscover and engage with the work of these pioneers. Leng highlights sexology's empowering potential for women, but also contends that in its intersection with eugenics, the narrative is not wholly celebratory. By detailing gendered efforts to understand and theorize sex through science, she reveals the cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Ultimately, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science helps readers to understand these women's ideas in all their complexity in order to appreciate their unique place in the history of sexology.

Queer Feminist Science Studies

Queer Feminist Science Studies PDF Author: Cyd Cipolla
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295742593
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here “queer”—or denaturalize and make strange—ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power, privilege, and dispossession, while also highlighting potentialities for uncertainty, subversion, transformation, and play. Theoretically and rhetorically powerful, these essays also take seriously the materiality of “natural” objects and phenomena: bones, voles, chromosomes, medical records and more all help substantiate answers to questions such as, What is sex? How are race, gender, sexuality, and other systems of differences co-constituted? The foundational essays and new writings collected here offer a generative resource for students and scholars alike, demonstrating the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.

Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel

Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel PDF Author: Barbara Hill Rigney
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299077143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A greater part of the feminist movement has considered traditional psychology to be both a product and a defense of the status quo, a patriarchal society. Here, Barbara Hill Rigney explores emerging feminist psychology by applying it to literary works by women who have depicted the relationship between madness and the female condition. The result is a fascinating and illuminating exposition, certain to be welcomed by students and scholars in literature and women's studies, as well as those in sociology and psychology whose interests include feminism and problems of women and society. Among the works Rigney considers are Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, all of which depict insanity in relation to sexual politics. These authors portray a patriarchal social system which, in itself, manifests symptoms of collusive madness in the form of war or sexual oppression and is thereby seen as threatening to female psychological survival. Each of Rigney's author subjects sees her protagonist as tragically divided between male society's prescribed roles for women and a sense of an authentic self. Thus emerges a pattern, common to all works, in which the divided self is reflected by the inevitable juxtaposition of the protagonist to a doppelgänger, an "insane" self, an extension of the protagonist who herself can be regarded as sane only by degree. A return to "true" sanity is traced through the patterns found in the selected works. Rigney explores the literary metaphor of the return of Demeter or the Amazon mother to restore the alienated female protagonists. In order to begin the return from psychosis, Rigney concludes, they must find the mother within themselves in the form of a feminist consciousness of self-worth.

Complaints and Disorders

Complaints and Disorders PDF Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
In this sequel to their underground bestseller Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, Ehrenreich and English document the tradition of American sexism in medicine before and after the turn of the century. Citing numerous 'treatments' and 'rest cures' perpetrated on women through the decades, they analyze the biomedical rationales used to justify sex discrimination.

Why We Lost the Sex Wars

Why We Lost the Sex Wars PDF Author: Lorna N. Bracewell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781517906733
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s-the rivalries and the remarkable alliances"--

Feminist Science-Fiction? Gender Aspects in Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" and Feminist Criticism

Feminist Science-Fiction? Gender Aspects in Ursula K. Le Guin's Author: Celine Briot
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668032742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Bonn (Anglistik), course: Science-Fiction, language: English, abstract: In recent decades the literary genre of Science Fiction has experienced a rising interest which might be attributed to the rapid technological development and the deep integration of it into daily life. Science Fiction offers writers a wide range of potential themes to explore and is thus a very complex genre. While often being considered male oriented, at least during the Feminist Movement in the 1960s, female authors found their way into the genre and raised questions about gender roles, political inequality and sexuality within their works. Among those female writers was Ursula K. Le Guin who gained wide recognition for her writing and is today regarded one of the most influential science-fiction and fantasy author of the twentieth century. Asscociated with feminist tendencies in her works, her most famous novel referred to be feminist science fiction is "The Left Hand of Darkness" in which she imagined an androgynous society in order to investigate what society would be if sex did not matter. But also many other of her works have received attention from critics interested in gender and feminism. In this paper I intend to analyse and discuss the depiction of gender and the realisation of feminist aspects in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed: An ambiguous Utopia". The novel won several important literary awards such as the Hugo and the Nebula and gained a lot of respect among critics for its great literary qualities and its extensive exploration of political ideas and social themes, including for example anarchism, capitalism and socialism. It is set on the fictional planets Urras and Anarres which inhabit two contrasting societies, one capitalist and class oriented and the other one following the principles of anarchism, avoiding any form of social hierarchy among its population. Anarres – apparently the utopian planet in Le Guin's work, is often called a feminist utopia for its conception of gender. However, Le Guin has been highly criticised from feminist for several problematic issues in her approach of sexual politics in the novel. The question therefore arises weather "The Dispossessed" really can be labeled feminist science-fiction and if Anarres really can be called a feminist utopia?

Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics PDF Author: Kate Millett
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068898
Category : Sex in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Praised and denounced when it was first published in 1970, Sexual Politics not only explored history but also became part of it. Kate Millett's groundbreaking book fueled feminism's second wave, giving voice to the anger of a generation while documenting the inequities -- neatly packaged in revered works of literature and art -- of a complacent and unrepentant society. Sexual Politics laid the foundation for subsequent feminist scholarship by showing how cultural discourse reflects a systematized subjugation and exploitation of women. Millett demonstrates in detail how patriarchy's attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. Her incendiary work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics -- from D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead -- for their use of sex to degrade and undermine women. A new introduction to this edition draws attention to some of the forms patriarchy has taken recently in consolidating its oppressive and dangerous control.