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.

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.

Scholar, journalist, activist, and noted author, Betty Friedan led a public campaign for equality in American society that stretched from 1950's suburbia to the close of the 20th century. Friedan's personal experiences motivated her to rally against anti-Semitism at Smith College, reveal wage discrimination as a reporter for labor unions, define domestic dissatisfaction in The Feminine Mystique, and organize women for equality with the founding of the National Organization for Women. That public persona also affected her private life in marriage, motherhood, and eventual divorce. This newest addition to Longman's Library of American Biography Series follows Friedan through nearly 50 years of championing equality, mapping the successes and shortfalls of her agenda. The titles in the Library of American Biography Series make ideal supplements for American History Survey courses or other courses in American history where figures in history are explored. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each interpretative biography in this series focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. At the same time, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times.

Contrary to clichés about the end of feminism, Deborah Siegel argues that younger women are reliving the battles of its past, and reinventing it--with a vengeance. From feminist blogging to the popularity of the WNBA, girl culture is on the rise. A lively and compelling look back at the framing of one of the most contentious social movements of our time, Sisterhood, Interrupted exposes the key issues still at stake, outlining how a twenty-first century feminist can reconcile the personal with the political and combat long-standing inequalities that continue today.

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.

Conventional philosophical wisdom holds that no agent can invoke its own moral integrity — no agent can invoke fidelity to its deepest ethical commitments — as an independent moral consideration. This is because moral integrity simply consists in doing what is, all-things-considered, the right thing. Integrity argues that this conventional wisdom is mistaken with regard to individual agents, but is especially misguided with regard to liberal democracies as collective agents. Even more than individual persons, liberal democracies as collective agents often face integrity considerations of independent moral force, affecting the moral status of actual political decisions. After defending this philosophical thesis, this book illustrates its practical value in thinking through a wide range of practical policy problems. These problems range from 'dirty' national security policies, through the moral status of political honours celebrating political figures of questionable integrity, to the 'clean hands' dilemmas of political operatives who enable media demagogues to scapegoat vulnerable ethnic and racial minorities.

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.