'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

A long-needed corrective and alternative view of Western art history, these seventeen essays by respected scholars are arranged chronologically and cover every major period from the ancient Egyptian to the present. While several of the essays deal with major women artists, the book is essentially about Western art history and the extent to which it has been distorted, in every period, by sexual bias. With 306 illustrations.

What if the women of the Bible told their own stories? Lady Midrash: Poems Reclaiming the Voices of Biblical Women brings to life alternative interpretations and forgotten female perspectives from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Following in the footsteps of Jewish midrash, a storytelling tradition that explores the gaps in scripture, these poems re-examine the experiences of Biblical women. Sidelined heroines are celebrated. Supposed villainesses get to speak for themselves. Lady Midrash reverses convention, probes familiar narratives, attends to small moments, highlights peripheral and silent characters, and names the nameless. The imagination of midrash provides the reader with a creative space to rethink assumptions and reconsider the accounts of women in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

A sequel to the pioneering volume, Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, published in 1982, The Expanding Discourse contains 29 essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, representing some of the best feminist art-historical writing of the past decade. Chronologically arranged, the essays demonstrate the abundance, diversity, and main conceptual trends in recent feminist scholarship.

DIVA visual history about how feminist artists have appropriated and incorporated the signification of the pin-up genre within their own work./div

A fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology, and an invitation for all women to reclaim these stories as inspiration for a more wild, more “monstrous” version of feminism The folklore that has shaped our dominant culture teems with frightening female creatures. In our language, in our stories (many written by men), we underline the idea that women who step out of bounds—who are angry or greedy or ambitious, who are overtly sexual or not sexy enough—aren’t just outside the norm. They’re unnatural. Monstrous. But maybe, the traits we’ve been told make us dangerous and undesirable are actually our greatest strengths. Through fresh analysis of 11 female monsters, including Medusa, the Harpies, the Furies, and the Sphinx, Jess Zimmerman takes us on an illuminating feminist journey through mythology. She guides women (and others) to reexamine their relationships with traits like hunger, anger, ugliness, and ambition, teaching readers to embrace a new image of the female hero: one that looks a lot like a monster, with the agency and power to match. Often, women try to avoid the feeling of monstrousness, of being grotesquely alien, by tamping down those qualities that we’re told fall outside the bounds of natural femininity. But monsters also get to do what other female characters—damsels, love interests, and even most heroines—do not. Monsters get to be complete, unrestrained, and larger than life. Today, women are becoming increasingly aware of the ways rules and socially constructed expectations have diminished us. After seeing where compliance gets us—harassed, shut out, and ruled by predators—women have never been more ready to become repellent, fearsome, and ravenous.

Through an interview-based study, Victoria Pitts has researched the subcultural milieu of contemporary body modification, focusing on the ways sexuality, gender and ethnicity are being reconfigured through new body technologies - not only tattooing, but piercing, cyberpunk and such 'neotribal' practices as scarification. She interprets the stories of sixteen body modifiers (as well as some subcultural magazines and films) using the tools of feminist and queer theory. Pitts not only covers a hot topic but also situates it in a theoretical context.