Through the medium of women's bodies, Fan Hong explores the significance of religious beliefs, cultural codes and political dogmas for gender relations, gender concepts and the human body in an Asian setting.

This original book brings Chinese women to the centre of the Chinese cultural stage by examining the role which exercise and, subsequently, sport played in their liberation.

Footbinding is widely condemned as perverse & as symbolic of male domination over women. This study offers a more complex explanation of a thousand year practice, contending that the binding of women's feet in China was sustained by the interests of both women and men.

This is the first in-depth global study of women's football across the world. This collection considers women's football, in fifteen countries worldwide, in a global context, and analyzes its progress, challenges and problems it has faced. It shows how women's football has made a significant contribution to the emancipation of women's football in many countries. It also traces the evolution of women's football in face of resistance, rejection and prejudice and describes women footballer's struggle for equal rights in a male dominated football world.

In The Liberation of Women, Roberta Hamilton explores two of the key questions that have been systematically raised by the Women's Liberation Movement: why have women occupied a subordinate position in society and how can the variation in the forms and intensity of their exploitation and oppression be explained? Within the Women's Liberation Movement there have been seen to be two different and opposed answers to these questions: a feminist answer and a Marxist one. This new work attempts to examine this debate in specific analytical terms through a study of the changing role of women during a particular historical period - the seventeenth century. In the course of less than one hundred years the rise of capitalism and the acceptance of Protestantism had separately and together radically altered every aspect of a woman's life. Can both a feminist and a Marxist analysis account for these changes? Do such accounts conflict with each other, making a choice inevitable? Do they overlap to such an extent that retaining both would be redundant? Or, finally, are they complementary, can they usefully coexist? The Liberation of Women will be of particular interest to students of history, sociology and Women's Studies and to those who have been involved in the Women's Liberation Movement. In particular, it will prove essential basic reading for an ever-growing number of courses on sexual divisions in society and the role of women.

Women Willing to Fight is a collection of essays that explores the presence of the fighting woman in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Drawn from a variety of genres, the authors examine the changing role, image and position of this figure in film over recent decades. The increasing dominance of this character and her repositioning as a protagonist reinvigorates discussion concerning the dynamics of film narrative and spectacle. Each contribution takes as its focus a central character from the Hollywood blockbuster era, examining in detail the motivations and implications of the fighting female. In doing so the collection raises significant questions about the place of the fighting woman in contemporary media and the relationships she forges on and off-screen. With a strong appreciation of the mixed messages inherent in images of fighting women, Women Willing to Fight seeks to draw attention to the embodied forms - physical, intellectual and emotional - through which female fighters are represented. The anthology places particular emphasis on the emergence of the physically empowered woman, a character for whom the body has become a weapon and a target. While early cinematic representations allowed women to voice their fury and frustration, today’s female fighters not only ‘speak up’ but ‘muscle up’. Putting aside the supernatural powers of many action heroines, this volume focuses on the kinds of fighting skills, abilities and desires that are engendered in characterisations of mortal women. To this end the volume implicitly addresses complex and cross-cultural notions of ‘extra-ordinary’ power. By examining the embodied arsenal that these characters possess and develop - through training, conditioning, and life experience - it considers the representation of motivation and metamorphoses into ‘the fighting woman’: how a woman fights holds implicit meaning and inevitably urges us to consider why and what she is fighting for.

Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young girls to sit still and work with their hands. Interviews with 1,800 elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls' hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because many village families depended on selling such goods. When factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away, Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.