This interdisciplinary book explores women's narratives in a wide variety of media and genre, from soap opera and film to the post-modern novel and Shakespearian drama. Adopting an innovative feminist perspective, it focuses particularly on the themes of hybridity and monstrosity in language and the body. In doing so, it raises issues to do with closure and temporal and spatial dislocation, drawing on themes of passion, paranoia and desire.

On women authors and women in literature

Blood Stories focuses on menarche as a central aspect of body politics in contemporary US society, emphasizing that women are integrated into the social and sexual order through the body. Using oral and written narratives of 104 diverse women, the authors address the central question of how menarche as a bodily event signifying womanhood takes on cultural significance in a society that devalues women. Exploring issues of contamination and concealment and the sexualization of women's bodies that occurs at menarche, the authors emphasize how the politics of gender are negotiated on/through women's bodies.

With women’s anger, empowerment, and the critical importance of intersectional feminism taking center stage in much of the dialogue happening in feminist spaces right now, an anthology like this has never been more important. The voices in this collection of essays and interviews offer perspectives and experiences that help women find common ground, unity, and allyship. Through personal essays and interviews about what it is like to live as a woman (cis + trans) in this modern world—with all of our love, anger, complexities, and desires for justice—All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body includes vulnerable, painful truths and bold inspiration. This anthology is for seasoned feminists and young feminists alike—anyone looking to find inspiration in radical activism, creativity, healing, and more. This book covers topics of social and economic justice, creativity, racism, transgender perspectives, sexuality, sex work, addiction and recovery, reproductive rights, assault, relationship dynamics, families, fitting and not fitting in, radical self-care, witchcraft, and more. If love and anger are two sides of the same coin, for women there are worlds to be explored with every flip of that coin. Readers will find a glimpse into those worlds in the pages of All of Me. Contributors include Silvia Federici, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Ariel Gore, Laurie Penny, Lidia Yuknavitch, Christine No, Kandis Williams, Vatan Doost, Deya, Phoenix LeFae, Anna Silastre, Michel Wing, Bethany Ridenour, Lorelle Saxena, Airial Clark, Patty Stonefish, Nayomi Munaweera, Melissa Madera, Margaret Elysia Garcia, Leilani Clark, Ariel Erskine, Wendy-O Matik, Kara Vernor, Starhawk, adrienne maree brown, Gerri Ravyn Stanfield, Sanam Mahloudji, Melissa Chadburn, Avery Erickson, and Milla Prince.

Throughout the 1970s & 1980s, women argued that unless they gained information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the centre of women's liberation.

Woman's voice and body are closely entwined in the Arabo-Islamic tradition, argues Fedwa Malti-Douglas in this pioneering book. Spanning the ninth through twentieth centuries and covering a wide range of texts—from courtly anectdote to mystical and philosophical treatises, from works of geography to autobiography—this study reveals how woman's access to literary speech has remained mediated through her body. Malti-Douglas first analyzes classical texts (both well-known works like The Thousand and One Nights and others still ignored in the West) in which the female voice, often associated with wit or trickery of a sexual nature, is subordinated to the male scriptor. Showing how early Arabo-Islamic discourse continues to influence contemporary Arabic writing, she maintains that today feminist writers of novels, short stories, and autobiography must work through this tradition, even if they subvert or reject it in the end. Whereas woman in the classical period speaks through the body, woman in the modern period often turns corporeality into a literary weapon to achieve power over discourse. Fedwa Malti-Douglas is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. Her books include Structures of Avarice: The Bukhala' in Medieval Arabic Literature (Leiden) and Blindness and Autobiography: Al-Ayyam of Taha Husayn (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.