This impressive collection of previously unpublished essays examines the relationship between competing conceptions of "nature" and "woman." By looking historically and comprehensively at the problems and questions associated with human thinking about nature and woman, the contributors strive to gain the proper vantage point from which to assess modern virtues and vices. Also taking note of important religious and literary contributions to thought on nature and woman, these essays present a broad range of claims from classical Greece to the present intended to stimulate modern thinking. Nature, Woman, and the Art of Politics will prove indispensable to scholars of philosophy, political science and women's studies.

John Russon draws from a broad range of art and literature to show how philosophy speaks to the most basic and important questions in our everyday lives. In Sites of Exposure, Russon grapples with how personal experiences such as growing up and confronting death combine with broader issues such as political oppression, economic exploitation, and the destruction of the natural environment to make life meaningful. His is cutting-edge philosophical work, illuminated by original and rigorous thinking that relies on cross-cultural communication and engagement with the richness of human cultural history. These probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics, are appropriate for students and scholars of philosophy at all levels.

Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature explains the relation between ecofeminism, or ecological feminism, and other feminist theories including radical green theories such as deep ecology. Val Plumwood provides a philosophically informed account of the relation of women and nature, and shows how relating male domination to the domination of nature is important and yet remains a dilemma for women.

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.