Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination is Changing the World

Explores the controversial implications of lesbian insemination

Each year hundreds of children around the world are born to lesbian mothers who conceived through alternative insemination. This unique form of family-making creates families with no legal or psychological father, and challenges some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to be a family. How, and why, do lesbians use insemination to build their families? How could it best be protected by law? Is insemination the ultimate in lesbian liberation, or a sell-out to nuclear family norms? How are race, class, feminism, and human engineering involved? Drawing on legal findings and personal interviews, as well as medical and psychoanalytic research, sociologist Amy Agigian looks at the impact and potential of this form of reproduction.

Baby Steps is the first in-depth discussion of the issues and questions raised by lesbian insemination, and the book has been designed to serve the interests of general readers and health care providers as well as teachers and students in women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, sociology, legal studies, and bioethics.

“Baby Steps is a fascinating study of the world of lesbian alternative insemination. Agigian has taken the unique step of critiquing the institutions and society in which lesbian families exist, rather than the families and conception methods themselves. In doing so, she brings into focus the institutional discrimination that has been perpetrated against lesbian families, particularly within the medical and legal systems, and justly argues that such reactions require radical revision. She tracks the politicization of lesbian alternative insemination from an invisible and largely autonomous practice to its commercialization and mainstreaming, which although medically safer, shifts the reproductive control and accessibility.�
—Dr. Ruth McNair, Senior Lecturer, Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne

“Baby Steps presents a fascinating glance at our cultural and technological possibilities for a more gender-fluid and nurture-centered future.�
—Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

“Patriarchy is a longstanding, durable institution and this book exhilarates any reader—heterosexual or lesbian—who is weary of living under its mantle.�
—Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Vermont and author of Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment

Winner of the NWSA 2008 Gloria Anzulúa Book Prize

The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book is the first to show how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women's opportunities today.

Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance

The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women's experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger.

Interviews with 58 Black women explore the restrictive myth of the "Strong Black Woman." In particular, Beauboeuf-Lafontant highlights the physical and emotional toll of this performance of invulnerability, which leaves many Black women suffering from eating disorders and depression.

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and voice-centered research, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences on normative Black femininity. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary quality of "authentic" Black womanhood, maintaining that the expectation of strength creates a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and imbalances of power.

"Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman makes an important contribution to the literature. No other work systematically studies the ways black women internalize and resist strong black woman discourse. Beauboeuf-Lafontant convincingly argues that investment in the strong black woman myth injures black women and strengthens the racist divisions between women."

—Maxine Craig, author of Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race

Sexism in America:Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future

An expose of the pervasive and rampant discrimination in virutally every aspect of women's lives.
PW REVIEW: "This is an excellent easible deciperable text for history, sociology &women's studies studies--and even older feminists...Berg offers a wakeup call for young women entering the cultural and career trenches on what went wrong and how to fix it."
LJ REview: "Highly recommended...Each chapter ...offers an impassioned plea:feminism in not dead, but there is still a great need...to fight for the right of women in America. As Berg aptly states in her conclusion'Everyone who believes in gender equality ...must join together to push for progressives policies that will enhance all of our lives."

Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault

Women's responses to rape have taken many forms over the past three decades, from guerrilla actions targeting individual assailants to the founding of rape crisis centers. This timely book illuminates the movement's importance to the broader women's movement and discusses the public policy implications of this activism.

Maria Bevacqua locates the roots of rape consciousness, traces the evolution of an anti-rape ideology on the feminist agenda, describes how the rape issue moved to the wider public agenda, and investigates the various manifestations and strategies of anti-rape politics. She examines how feminists first articulated the rape experience as a women's issue, traces the evolution of anti-rape ideology over a thirty-year period, and considers recent tensions in the movement, including allegations of a feminist date rape hype in the media and in the academy.

The author untangles the public and legislative responses to the rape issue, analyzing both the political context that made policymakers receptive to anti-rape goals and the effect of the anti-rape movement on American political and social life.

New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation

“Chris Bobel is a careful ethnographer, respectful of research participants, and while she clearly takes a stand on menstrual activism, she handily defends her proposition that feminism is ‘finding its balance between reliving its past and creating its future.’ Bobel’s work, which includes incisive analysis of how third-wave activists incorporate and update tactics and strategies of the second wave, will be a welcome addition to the scholarship of feminism.�—Elizabeth Kissling, author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation
New Blood offers a fresh interdisciplinary look at feminism-in-flux. For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second- and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women’s movement.

Through her critical ethnographic lens, Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category “gender�) and challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, New Blood reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists “culture jamming� commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing “holistic womb health,� and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today’s feminism-on-the-ground—indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.

Chris Bobel is an associate professor and chair of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of The Paradox of Natural Mothering.

The Practice of U.S. Women's History

Gayle Gullett, author of Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 "Beautifully written, [this anthology] allows the reader to experience the excitement of the field: the thrill of new insights, the denouncement of the passé and the call to seek another horizon."

Book Description In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political. They have entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself.
In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. They examine, for example, how conceptions of gender shaped immigration officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights. Reading the past with all of the messiness, contradictions, and excitement inherent in real life, this book is a provocative meditation on the state of the field.

Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

"Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo are groundbreaking." --AnaLouise Keating, Texas Woman's University

"Deeply expressive, intellectually profound, and very moving. It offers new paths into, beside, and through identity politics." --Katie King, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Encarnación takes a new look at identity, following the contemporary movement away from the fixed categories of identity politics toward a more fluid conception of the intersections between identities and communities. The works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Ana Castillo enable us to examine how identities shift and intersect with others through processes of "incarnation." Since the 1980s, critics have come to equate these writers with Chicana feminist identity politics. This critical trend, however, has been unable to account, as does Encarnación, for these writers' increasing emphasis on bodies that are sick, disabled, permeable, and, oftentimes, mystical.

Concerned equally with the medical-surgical interventions available in our postmodern age and with the ways of understanding bodies in the Native American and Catholic traditions these writers invoke, Encarnación develops a model for identity that expands beyond the boundaries of individual bodies. The book argues that this model has greater utility for feminism than identity politics because it values human variability, sensation, and openness to others.

Living Ideas: A Memoir of The Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies

This is the first memoir by a founding coordinator. The Berkeley program was started by students in the early seventies. Even as it built curriculum, founded "theories of women's studies" through its publications, encouraged departments to notice the study of women and tried to nurture students, it experienced competition within the program and hostility from without by faculty who did not think a prestigious university was the place for a "political" study. The memoir interweaves stories of the founding with the "personal," the author's search for equal relationships and the solitude to write.

The book is self-published; a website (gloriabowles.net). The author will be at the Atlanta convention, with a session on the book on Friday 1:15-2:30 and a signing on Saturday morning at 9. a.m. at Charis Books & More, booth 317, where the books will be available for purchase for $20 throughout the convention.

URL: http://www.gloriabowles.net

Living Ideas: A Memoir of The Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies

This is the first memoir by a founding coordinator, which traces the political/persona/academic challenges of the birth of women's studies. Available for $20 at www.gloriabowles.net

Here is what readers are saying about LIVING IDEAS:

"Beautifully written. This is exactly how I remember it."

"LIVING IDEAS goes fearlessly into the emotional and sexual tumult of the seventies and eighties."

"I very much enjoyed reading your beautifully written memoir...I could not put it down, identifying with so many of your struggles...I appreciated the way you interspersed your career struggles with that of your love life - a struggle most of us contended with..."

"I had to put it down: it took me back to painful years in grad school. But I also underlined passages for my daughter." 

"I appreciate...how you expressed the psssion of the times, the underlying impetuses of the movement, the deep (and corrosive) conflicts ensuing, and both the gains and 'prices paid,' individually and collectively."

Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages

Nonfiction Anthology: Women's Issues & Studies.
Paperback: 268 pages
Publisher: All Things That Matter Press.

Synopsis: "This unique collection includes over fifty articles by more than thirty-five diverse American women who revisit, celebrate, and share defining moments in their lives. Readers will see the universal in milestones of body, mind, family, career, and personal empowerment—whether joyous or difficult, chosen or unexpected, common or rare. These are the poignant passages of women, told by talented and award winning writers: intimate glimpses into the lives of our sisters, friends, aunts, mentors, wives, grandmothers, partners, mothers, daughters—ourselves."

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

About the Author

Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right

While the Christian Right has spearheaded a variety of antigay projects over the past fifteen years, including interventions in public schools, antigay-rights initiatives, and support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, observers of the institutionalized Christian Right have also noted a softening of antigay public rhetoric. Sin, Sex, and Democracy analyzes these two ostensibly conflicting phenomena. Examining Christian witnessing tracts, the ex-gay movement, and recent linkages between gays and terrorists, Cynthia Burack argues that as the Christian Right has become a more sophisticated interest group, leaders have become adept at tailoring different messages for mainstream audiences and for the internal pedagogical processes of Christian conservatives. Understanding the rhetoric and the theological convictions that lie behind them, Burack claims, is essential to better understand how American politics work and how to effectively respond to exclusionary forms of political thought and practice.

"This book offers a meticulously detailed account of the way in which antigay discourse is constructed and employed by the Christian Right and those closely associated with it. It is a topic of significance and central to the academic study of politics and cultural practice of politics, particularly in the United States." -- Angelia R. Wilson, author of Below the Belt: Sexuality, Religion, and the American South

"The appeal of this book is the niche it fills: at a time when critics take well-worn and cheap shots at the Christian Right ill fitting the seriousness of the times, this author demands that critics take the Christian Right seriously, not only politically, but theologically." -- Amy E. Ansell, editor of Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics

Advice from the Top: What Minority Women Say About Their Career Success

Advice From the Top offers tips and advice for careers in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds.  Campbell interviewed fourteen extraordinary minority women who shared their insights and views on what constitutes success,  factors contributing to success, obstacles encountered and what women can do today to get ahead.  They include millionaire business owners like Cathy Hughes and Eunice Dudley, nonprofit executive Jane Smith, former White House staffer Zina Pierre, television anchor, Andrea Roane and medical doctor, Bea Muglia.

"By sharing the stories of fourteen successful women of color, Valencia Campbell helps remove myths and mystery from the concept of success and ground it squarely in the context of gender, race and class realities.  This is a useful examination for all of us."  Ellen Bravo, Former Director, 9to5,  National Association of Working Women.

URL: http://www.advicefromtopwomen.com

Daughters of Kerala

Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the UN The quality of the writers and the accessible directness of the translations make this book a particular pleasure to read.

Book Description: Kerala, one of the smallest states in India, is located in the country's southwest corner. Known for its great beauty, religious diversity, and zero population growth, the region also boasts an exceptionally high literacy rate?reportedly above 91 percent?resulting in a large readership for books, journals, and newspapers. The quality of Kerala's literary production is very high, and this anthology represents some of its best short stories. Though educated and enterprising, women from this area face the same problems as women the world over. The stories in this collection explore their lives, giving readers everywhere a greater understanding of what it means to be a daughter of Kerala.

URL: http://www.achammachander.com

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth

Get a detailed look at the Thai sex/gender system--through analysis of the personal stories from transgendered youth in Thailand.

The Thai term sao braphet song (a "second type of woman") describes males who reject the gender of masculinity for femininity. Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth uses the narrative method, stories in the words of these "second type of women" to analyze these transgendered experiences. This previously ignored perspective of the Thai sex/gender system gained through this theoretical and methodological approach offers students and general readers a rich, more readily accessible foundation of knowledge about gendered subjectivity and sex/gender systems.

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth features in-depth, autobiographical life histories from individual Thai transgendered youth. Life stories, told in the participants' own words, provides an engaging, at times touching, always insightful look at Thai culture's sex/gender system. The authors then expertly analyze the narratives to illuminate common themes and constructions within this group, allowing an opportunity for contrast and discussion on transgender experiences in other nations.

Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth analyzes the major themes in the stories, including: identities definitions and descriptive labels etiologies of sao braphet song-ness the notion of acceptance narrator motivations for participating in the project Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth is illuminating, reflective reading for educators, undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, or anyone interested in discovering more about transgenderism in a specific cultural context.

Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture

Introduction and Table of Contents available at:
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/excotnat.html

Description

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women--from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization--into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.