"Updated and with a new preface by the authors."--Cover.

The twentieth anniversary release of a groundbreaking feminist text: a powerful indictment of the current state of feminism, and a passionate call to arms Today, people of all genders strive to uphold the goals of feminism and proudly embrace the term, but the movement itself is often beset with confusion and questions. Does personal empowerment happen at the expense of politics? Is feminism for the few—or does it speak to the many as they bump up against daily injustices? What does it mean to say "the future is female"? In 2000, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’s Manifesta set out to chronicle the feminism of their generation. They brilliantly revealed the snags in various hubs of the movement—from antipathy to the term itself to the hyped hatred of feminism’s imperfect spokespeople—and showed that these snags had not imperiled the feminist cause. The book went on to inspire a new generation of readers and has become a classic of contemporary feminist literature. In the decades since Manifesta was published, the world has changed in ways both promising and terrifying. This twentieth anniversary edition of Manifesta features an updated bibliography, timeline, and resources, as well as a new introduction by the authors. Expertly unpacking both early women’s history and the Third Wave feminism that seeded the active righteous intersectionality we see today, Manifesta remains an urgent and necessary tool to make sense of our past, present, and future.

From the authors of Manifesta, an activism handbook that illustrates how to truly make the personal political. Grassroots is an activism handbook for social justice. Aimed at everyone from students to professionals, stay-at-home moms to artists, Grassroots answers the perennial question: What can I do? Whether you are concerned about the environment, human rights violations in Tibet, campus sexual assault policies, sweatshop labor, gay marriage, or the ongoing repercussions from 9-11, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards believe that we all have something to offer in the fight against injustice. Based on the authors' own experiences, and the stories of both the large number of activists they work with as well as the countless everyday people they have encountered over the years, Grassroots encourages people to move beyond the "generic three" (check writing, calling congresspeople, and volunteering) and make a difference with clear guidelines and models for activism. The authors draw heavily on individual stories as examples, inspiring readers to recognize the tools right in front of them--be it the office copier or the family living room--in order to make change. Activism is accessible to all, and Grassroots shows how anyone, no matter how much or little time they have to offer, can create a world that more clearly reflects their values.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender offers a comprehensive examination of media and gender studies, charting its histories, investigating ongoing controversies, and assessing future trends. The 59 chapters in this volume, written by leading researchers from around the world, provide scholars and students with an engaging and authoritative survey of current thinking in media and gender research. The Companion includes the following features: With each chapter addressing a distinct, concrete set of issues, the volume includes research from around the world to engage readers in a broad array of global and transnational issues and intersectional perspectives. Authors address a series of important questions that have consequences for current and future thinking in the field, including postfeminism, sexual violence, masculinity, media industries, queer identities, video games, digital policy, media activism, sexualization, docusoaps, teen drama, cosmetic surgery, media Islamophobia, sport, telenovelas, news audiences, pornography, and social and mobile media. A range of academic disciplines inform exploration of key issues around production and policymaking, representation, audience engagement, and the place of gender in media studies. The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender is an essential guide to the central ideas, concepts and debates currently shaping media and gender research.

What explains the popularity and widespread appeal of numerous post-Yugoslav feminist and LGBTQ+ festivals in the last decade? This book argues that the millennial generation expresses "reparative politics", as a distinct type of activism, through festivals. Reparative political acting, as identified here, characteristically relies on playfulness and creativity, interpretative (gender) dissent, acceptance of organizational and programmatic messiness and hybridity, belonging, and positive affect. The reparative politics is vital in a context that is marked by an individual and collective trauma of heteropatriarchy, violent breakdown of the common state, and post-transitional economic precarity. The book uses excerpts from programs, interviews and observations collected through the multi-sited ethnographic research. Siročić’s focus on contemporary activism in Southeastern Europe challenges the narrow geopolitical understanding of the recent feminist politics and refutes the common assumptions of a passive millennial generation. Yet, the book’s relevance surpasses its area of study, as it argues against the popular deriding of "artivist" expressions as the "merely cultural" or "merely aesthetic" engagement. In contrast, the book claims that such activities urge a redefined understanding of political agency. Festivals as Reparative Politics demonstrates that contemporary feminist festivals represent a distinct reformulation of contentious politics of gender whose constitutive principles can be exemplary for other types of political engagements.

Queering Femininity focuses on femininity as a style of gender presentation and asks how (and whether) it can be refigured as a creative and queer style of the body. Drawing on a range of feminist texts and interviews with self-identifying queer femmes from the LGBTQ community, Hannah McCann argues that the tendency to evaluate femininity as only either oppressive or empowering limits our understanding of its possibilities. She considers the dynamic aspects of feminine embodiment that cannot simply be understood in terms of gender normativity and negotiates a path between understanding both the attachments people hold to particular gender identities and styles, and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender norms and expectations. Topics covered range from second wave feminist critiques of beauty culture, to the importance of hair in queer femme presentation. This book offers students and researchers of Gender, Queer and Sexuality Studies a fresh new take on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation that is not confined by the demands of identity politics.

In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema—an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition—will get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons’ films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons’ worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens—the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased—and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons’ iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.