The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

This study investigates the extent to which personal welfare state experiences affect general political orientations and attitudes. What are the political effects when a person is discontent with some aspect of, say, the particular health services or the public kindergartens that she has been in personal contact with? Do they lose faith in the welfare state or in leftist ideas about large-scale state intervention in society? Do they take their negative experiences as a sign that the political system and its politicians are not functioning satisfactorily? Will their inclination to support the governing party drop? And if so, how strong are the political effects of personal welfare state experiences compared to those of other, more well-known, explanatory factors? Addressing these and other questions, this study develops a theoretical framework that incorporates insights from a multitude of research traditions, including research on the welfare state, voting behaviour, social psychology, rational choice theory, political psychology, and institutional theory. The framework is tested empirically using Swedish primary survey data collected under the auspices of the 1999 West Sweden SOM Survey, and the 1999 Swedish European Parliament Election Study.

The eminent political scientist Manfred Halpern (1924-2001) viewed politics as belonging to each of us, as part of the nature of being human. In A Comprehensive Philosophy of Transformation, his magnum opus, Halpern elucidates the interconnected "four faces of our being" the political, personal, historical, and sacred. This momentous volume identifies several modes of political activity, warns against the dangers of leaving politics to professional politicians, and urges us to build networks of compassion that include everyone in a just society. Overall, Halpern calls for a transformative politics achieved through enhanced participation and understanding.

In an era of the radicalization of political ideologies in Europe, long-lasting societal remnants of the economic breakdown, and the neoliberalist consolidation of capitalist values, it is ethically relevant to critically reconceptualise the meaning and role of European feminisms and the challenges they have to confront today, both locally and transnationally. In the face of ubiquitous beliefs about feminism having exhausted itself, such a rethinking of the place and priorities of feminist politics within and outside academia is urgently needed. The popularization of the so-called faux-feminisms, assuming attained emancipation in the present-day neoliberal environment of advanced capitalism, calls for close examination and creative counter-strategies. Bearing in mind that the patterns of oppression still prevail, becoming even more and more insidious and complex, it is all the more necessary to identify, scrutinize, and contest the vicissitudes of the dominant apparatus of control and subjugation, and to demystify the purportedly gender-inclusive operations of the regime. As such, the book seeks to renew an academic and political interest in the epistemological tradition of context-created knowledge. Bringing together authors from diverse geopolitical locations, this volume constitutes a forum for fruitful encounters across generations and national and cultural differences, contributing to a better understanding of the complexities of patriarchal ideologies and to the creation of a more sustainable communal future. The book offers a collection of chapters introducing situated perspectives which adopt intersectional optics in order to analyze the transformations of the contemporary socio-political realm and reflect research priorities within present-day feminist scholarship.

How the Personal became Political brings together new research on the feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1970s in Australia. It addresses the political and theoretical significance of these movements, asking how and why did matters previously considered private and personal, become public and political? These movements produced a series of changes that were both interconnected and profound. The pill became generally available and sexuality was both celebrated and flaunted. Homosexuality was gradually decriminalized. Gay liberation and Women’s Liberation erupted. Activists established women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, and counselling services. Crucially, in Australia, these developments coincided with the election of progressive governments, who appointed women’s advisors and expanded the role of the state in the provision of childcare and other services. It was a decade of contestation and transformation. This book addresses the political and theoretical significance of these 1970s revolutions, and poses key questions about the nature of sweeping change. What were the key policy shifts? How were protests connected to legislative reforms? How did Australia fit into the broader transnational movements for change? What are the legacies of these movements and what can activists today learn from them? Scholars from several disciplines offer fresh insight into this wave of social revolution, and its contemporary relevance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Australian Feminist Studies.

Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users. Yet the myth of biologically-based mental illness defines our present. The book rethinks madness and distress reclaiming them as human, not medical, experiences.

An in-depth consideration of women's activism in the AIDS and breast cancer movements.