Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.

Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism argues that gender is best understood as a felt sense of the organization of the human body. Through Japanese aesthetics and American pragmatism, this book argues that re-understanding gender as an affect, or a feeling, can expand the ways that gender is understood, enacted, and theorized in experience.

This exhaustive bibliography contains more than 2,300 annotated entries on the lives of women in Japan. It includes books and book chapters, articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines, and published conference papers. The authors have diligently researched databases, bibliographies, and indexes, and have based their detailed annotations on a close examination of the works cited. The volume lists works published in English from 1841 to the present, and a particularly significant feature is the inclusion of literary works by Japanese women. The book is further balanced by material on non-Japanese women living in Japan. All materials are available in the United States through standard interlibrary loan sources. A valuable introduction provides detailed instructions for using the volume. The bibliography is divided into a number of broad sections on the public and private lives of women, and entries in each section are grouped in more specific categories covering home life, politics, education, religion, careers, the arts, and other areas. The sections on literature briefly introduce the lives and works of poets and prose writers, listing their individual works available in English translation. A concluding section provides access to reviews and overviews of scholarship on women in Japan. The extensive author, title, and subject indexes make this book of tremendous value to researchers in a wide range of disciplines.

This is the first academic exploration of contemporary lesbian sexuality in Japan and opens up a more inclusive representation of cultural and sexual diversity across women's studies and Japanese studies.