"This edited volume of first-person narratives and empirical studies questions what happens when "male" bodies "do" femininity, the complexities of male femininities, and the conditions under which men engage less with masculinity and more with femininity and the consequences of these practices within a historical moment of gender binary transgressions"--

This book is about how boys and girls learn to be men and women. Drawing on a wide range of studies, the author examines how masculinities and femininities are developed and understood by children and young people, in families, in schools, and with their peers.

This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.

Chinese Literature: Lydia H. Liu

This book provides a fresh overview on the debate about the remarkable regression of gender equality in the Balkans and South Caucasus caused by the fall of socialism and by the revitalization of religion in Turkey. Contrary to the prevailing opinion of researchers who state continuous male domination, the book presents strong arguments for an alternative outlook. By contrasting the realia of gender relations with the utopia of new femininities and new masculinities driven by digital visual communication, the book provokingly concludes with the arrival of two utopias: the Marlboro Man – still authoritative but lonely – conquering and refusing family obligations; and with the emergence of a new femininity type – strong and beautiful. As such this book provides a great resource to anthropologists, demographers, sociologists, gender and media researchers and all those interested in feminist issues.

Nancy J. Chodorow takes her fellow psychoanalysts to task for their monolithic and pathologizing accounts of deviant gender and sexuality. Drawing from her own clinical experience, the work of Freud, and a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, Chodorow argues that psychoanalysis has yet to disentangle male dominance from heterosexuality. Further, she demonstrates the paucity of psychoanalytics understanding of heterosexuality and the problematic polarizing of normal and abnormal sexualities. By returning to Freud and interpreting psychoanalysis through clinical eyes, Chodorow contends that psychoanalysis must consider individual specificity and personal, cultural, and social factors. Such a methodology entails a plurality of femininities and masculinities and enables us to understand a variety of sexualities.

Gender and the Construction of Hegemonic and Oppositional Femininities analyzes the construction of femininities within the key social institutions of school, work, and the media. The book draws from previous research to demonstrate how femininities are constructed in school and work and analyzes gendered representations in current fictional media.