Cecilia, a fifteenth-century Christian martyr, has long been considered the patron saint of music. In this pathbreaking volume, ten of the best known scholars in the newly emerging field of feminist musicology explore both how gender has helped shape genres and works of music and how music has contributed to prevailing notions of gender. The musical subjects include concert music, both instrumental and vocal, and the vernacular genres of ballads, salon music, and contemporary African American rap. The essays raise issues not only of gender but also of race and class, moving among musical practices of the courtly ruling class and the elite discourse of the twentieth-century modernist movement to practices surrounding marginal girls in Renaissance Venice and the largely white middle-class experiences of magazine and balladry.

An interdisciplinary work bringing together an international group of transgender writers, this text provides a collection of essays that are central to both academia and activism. Based on academic and "street" experiences, the book addresses the practical issues faced in changing the world view of gender while forcing theory a step forward from limitations of "queer", feminism and postmodernism. In a wide-ranging set of contributions, it addresses our engendered places now and what we can aim for in the future. It evaluates the mechanism we can use to galvanize both the micro theories of gender as a personal experience of oppression and the macro theories of gender as a site of social regulation. The collection aimes to take identity politics and reclaim identity for the "self".

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women’s rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family’s vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft’s thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women’s studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women’s rights.

A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

Reminiscent of Paolo Coelho's masterpiece "The Alchemist" and Lynn V. Andrew's acclaimed Medicine Woman series, The Heart of the Labyrinth is a beautifully evocative spiritual parable, filled with exotic landscapes and transformational soul lessons. As everything she thought she knew about herself disintegrates: her health, career, family and identity, Maya embarks on a journey of discovery to the land of her ancestors. There a mysterious Sage guides her through dreams, visions and lifetimes, to the heart of the labyrinth. Coming face-to-face with her subconscious belief that being a woman is a threat, she understands that to step into wholeness she will have to reclaim the sacred feminine fire burning in her soul. But what is at stake far exceeds her individual life: with it sits the fate of the Earth herself, waiting for the Priestess to be reborn. A grand, soul-shifting answer to the hungry soul's question: who am I? Maya's story calls us back to a sacred, personal connection with the Earth. Nicole Schwab is a mesmerizing new voice for our times, offering a message of Earth-centered wisdom reuniting us with the divine feminine. Nicole's work is in the tradition of many spiritual teachings: using story or parable as a vehicle for transmitting profound truths direct to the soul. And in the tradition of many women's writings, she blurs the lines between traditional genres of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She weaves stories within stories. Dreams, visions and different lifetimes, are blended in a rich satisfying narrative which nourishes the spirit and mind.

A unique feature of human development is that mothers and fathers are bound to a long period of child-rearing, during which the continuity of our species depends on the fulfilment of distinct parental roles and on the suppression of psychological potentials that conflict with those roles. But once the parental emergency is over, the author argues, men and women can assert those parts of their personalities curbed by the restrictions of raising children. It is this shift in roles - a product of evolution found throughout our species - that led David Gutmann to propose a new psychology of ageing, based not on the threat of loss but on the promise of important new pleasures and capacities.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-287) and index.