The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

This work examines the varieties of reductionism that affect philosophical writing about human origins and identity. Gillett goes on to discuss the effects of neurological interventions, such as psychosurgery, on the image of the human.

This interpretive ethnography explores the academic practices of three lesbian faculty members at Liberal U., a public research university. Drawing on poststructural theories, the text takes readers beyond constructions of lesbian faculty that rely on identity, voices, and visibility to consider the construction and shifting meanings of academic research, teaching, and collegial relations in practice. Talburt depicts the complicated relations of knowledge, identity, and sexuality as interrelated terms whose meanings are constructed as contingent possibilities. This book challenges us to rethink policy and practice, identity and difference, and knowledge and ignorance as lived and created in constantly shifting networks of relation.

An examination of the notions of subject and self from the Sophists to Foucault. Although the writings of Foucault have had tremendous impact on contemporary thinking about subjectivity, notions of the subject have a considerable history. In Foucault, Subjectivity and Identity Robert Strozier examines ideas of subject and self that have developed throughout western thought. He expands Foucault's idea of the subject as historically determined into a wide-ranging treatment of ideas of subjectivity, extending from those expressed by the ancient Sophists to notions of the subject at the end of the twentieth century. Strozier examines these traditions against the background of Foucault's work, especially Foucault's later writings on the history of self-relation and the subject and his idea of historical subjectivity in general. Strozier explores various periods of western thought, notably the Hellenistic era, the early Italian Renaissance, and the seventeenth century, to show that almost every treatment of subjectivity is related to the Sophist idea of the originating Subject. Drawing on a wide spectrum of writings - by Epicurus and Seneca, Petrarch and Montaigne, Dickens and Conrad, Fr

"This book overturns the conventional thinking about organization and identity and puts in its place a wholly new theoretical synthesis. It is not just an extraordinarily incisive commentary on modern life but it is also a key to thinking about identity in new ways which will prove an indispensable guide as we move beyond social constructionism. Remarkable." - Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, The University of Warwick "I have to say that as usual I find very refreshing Paul du Gay′s courageous and unconventional approach, a clarity of vision that I find very appealing." - Professor Marilyn Strathern, University Of Cambridge Like many other popular academic terms, ‘identity’ has been asked to do so much work that it has often ended up doing none at all and, as a consequence, there has been a recent turn away from identity work. In this book, Paul du Gay moves identity theory in a new direction, offering a distinctive approach to studying how persons - human and non human - are put together or assembled: how their ‘identities’ are formed. He does through an engagement with a range of work in the social sciences, humanities and in organization studies which privileges the business of description over metaphysical speculation and epochalist assertion. At the heart of the book is an approach to the material-cultural making up of ‘persons’ that involves a shift away from general social and cultural accounts concerning the formation of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ towards an understanding of the specific forms of personhood that individuals acquire through their immersion in and subjection to particular normative and technical regimes of conduct. The book is written for postgraduate students and researchers interested in debates about identity, subjectivity and personhood in a range of disciplines – especially those in sociology, social anthropology, geography, and organization and management studies.