Cet ouvrage a été conçu pour les personnes qui souhaitent s'initier aux problématiques de genre. Il a l'ambition de retracer un certain nombre de discussions théoriques et épistémologiques et proposer des réflexions autour des principales thématiques développées par les Etudes Genre. Il est également conçu comme une aide pédagogique destinée aux enseignantes. Les thématiques traitées interrogent, dans un premier temps, des notions telles que "femmes, féminisme, sexe ou genre". Dans un deuxième temps l'ouvrage aborde les notions de système et des régimes de genre à partir de trois domaines cruciaux de l'analyse de genre: la reproduction, la division sexuée du savoir et du travail et le politique. Il présente ensuite les trois courants classiques de la pensée féministe (libéral, marxiste et radical) et leurs analyses des inégalité de genre. Pour terminer, l'ouvrage se pose la question de l'ontologie de la différence entre femmes et hommes et aborde les problématiques politiques y relatives.

A fresh approach to the history and shape of science fiction In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the sites of action, the genres, in which the writer participates. This move calls for a thoroughly rhetorical view of invention, roughly in the tradition of Richard Young, Janice Lauer, and those who have followed them. Instead of mastering notions of "good" writing, Bawarshi feels that students gain more from learning how to adapt socially and rhetorically as they move from one "genred" site of action to the next.

Despite various decades of research and claim-making by feminist scholars and movements, gender remains an overlooked area in development studies. Looking at key issues in development studies through the prisms of gender and feminism, the authors demonstrate that gender is an indispensable tool for social change.