Kathy Davis

The story of how the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves has been adapted and reworked by women of different cultures around the world.

How Feminism Travels Across Borders

The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Halleh Ghorashi

Peer Smets

Contributions address the sites, practices, and narratives in which belonging is imagined, enacted and constrained, negotiated and contested. Focussing on three particular dimensions of belonging: belonging as space (neighbourhood, workplace, home), as practice (virtual, physical, cultural), and as biography (life stories, group narratives).

Spaces, Practices, Biographies

Contested Belonging

Jantine Oldersma

Monique Leijenaar

Drawing on feminist theories of women's oppression and on social theories of power, this book offers original analyses of the relationship between gender and power. The Gender of Power presents a critique of feminist theories of power as simply top-down models of the oppression of women. The authors argue that this notion presents women as passive victims and ignores the diversity and complexity of women's experiences. The ideas on power of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lukes and Foucault are also evaluated in terms of their usefulness in explaining relations between men and women, which can often be covert, consensual and intimate.

The Gender of Power

Pierre-Rene Noth

Bringing History Back Home

Past Times

Janice Irvine

This book addresses wide-ranging dilemmas that social researchers may face as a result of silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their research. In every research endeavour, thoughts, intuitions, biases, feelings or sensations may be left aside as the researcher attempts to come to terms with the complexities of material and figure out what the ‘main issue’ is. Researchers may pay attention to their own emotional responses during the interview, but often only in their field notes. Rarely do feelings of shock, irritation, boredom or, for that matter, amusement, excitement and delight find their way into the analysis itself. In addition, researchers are all susceptible to blind-spots, often unaware of what is being avoided in research or omitted from it. However, reflection about precisely these gaps or silences may prove essential for developing new and interesting questions as well as comprehensive, responsive, and responsible research practices. In this volume, an international, cross-disciplinary cohort of researchers think critically about the silences, neglected feelings, and blind-spots in their own work, and offer insights for enhancing research practices. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in research methods and methodology.

Silences, Neglected Feelings, and Blind-Spots in Research Practice

Mary Evans

The second wave of feminism which challenged and changed many assumptions was a product of various western cultures, with no single country possessing a monopoly on the writing of 'new' feminism. Though many of the contributions hailed from Europe and the United States, these works were often formed within local debates and framed within feminist traditions and political engagements specific to these nations. Transatlantic Conversations explores the differences yielded by such conditions and their consequences for the meaning of feminism.

Feminism as Travelling Theory

Transatlantic Conversations

Happiness is infectious in the watercolor art of Kathy Davis. It's carried on rite wings of birds and in the buzz of bees; in flowers bursting with color, in big red hearts, and in enormous golden suns. In this delightful book, inspiring quotations by authors, poets, and other creative souls are incorporated into Kathy's designs in jubilant calligraphy. Over a million people have shared Kathy's joyful expressions with friends and toyed ones in the form of greeting cards. Now audiences can enjoy a broader spectrum of her designs in this new gift book and the companion address book.

Address Book

The Time to Be Happy Is Now

Kathy Davis explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. She critically engages with the notion of cosmetic surgery as a neutral technology and shows how it is implicated in the surgical erasure of embodied difference.

Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery

Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences

Tangotanzen ist weltweit in Mode gekommen – eine Erfolgsstory mit vielen Gesichtern. Neben ökonomischen, historischen und politischen Aspekten spielen Sinnlichkeit und Emotionalität eine große Rolle, wie dieses Buch am Beispiel von Buenos Aires und Amsterdam zeigt. Grenzüberschreitend können empathische Gemeinschaften entstehen, die der sozialen Deprivation der Spätmoderne entgegen wirken und der Debatte um die Beziehung von globalem Süden und Norden neue Facetten hinzufügen.

Leidenschaftliche Begegnungen in einer globalisierten Welt

Tango tanzen

The book Our Bodies, Ourselves is a feminist success story. Selling more than four million copies since its debut in 1970, it has challenged medical dogmas about women’s bodies and sexuality, shaped health care policies, energized the reproductive rights movement, and stimulated medical research on women’s health. The book has influenced how generations of U.S. women feel about their bodies and health. Our Bodies, Ourselves has also had a whole life outside the United States. It has been taken up, translated, and adapted by women across the globe, inspiring more than thirty foreign language editions. Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women’s health. It was precisely the book’s distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

How Feminism Travels across Borders

Argentinean tango is a global phenomenon. Since its origin among immigrants from the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it has crossed and re-crossed many borders.Yet, never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism. In the wake of its latest revival, tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a modest, yet growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor. Through interviews and ethnographical research in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, Kathy Davis shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to them as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. She shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South in which Argentinean tango is—and has always been—embroiled. Davis also explores her uneasiness about her own passion for a dance which—when seen through the lens of contemporary critical feminist and postcolonial theories—seems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. She uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. She concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the ‘elsewhere.’ Dancing Tango is a vivid, intriguing account of an important global cultural phenomenon.

Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World

Dancing Tango

A Garden of Quotes for Year Round Warmth

A Kiss of Sun

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery

Reshaping the Female Body

Friends Are Flowers That Never Fade

Brian Davis

Summer on Black Fish Bay

Tales of Black Fish Bear

Judith Lorber

"This breathtakingly broad, interdisciplinary reader demonstrates how widely feminist thinking has spread, how deeply it has shaken settled assumptions in the disciplines and how much new light it throws on contemporary controversies." - Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin-Madison "A timely intervention and highly engaged, thoughtful and scholarly analysis of the state of gender and women's studies in the West by three eminent feminist scholars... Highly cognisant of the central issues that have fractured, blocked and enhanced western feminism." - Bev Skeggs, Goldsmiths "The comprehensiveness and the interdisciplinary range of themes are impressive, and they make the Handbook into a wonderful tool for teachers and students of women's and gender studies." - Nina Lykke, Linkoeping University Gender and women's studies is one of the most challenging fields within the social sciences - the dynamics of gender relations and the social and cultural implications of gender constructions offer a lively forum of debate. The Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies presents a comprehensive and engaging review of the most recent developments within the field, including the study of masculinity, the feminist implications of postmodernism, the 'cultural turn' and globalization. The authors review current research and offer critical analyses of women's and gender studies in work, the welfare state, family, education, religion, violence and war and feminist global politics. Edited by three leading academics from Europe and the United States, and with 25 chapters written by scholars based throughout the world, the Handbook situates the most important debates in the field within a uniquely international and interdisciplinary context. The Handbook is a useful introduction to gender theory and an exciting starting-point for fresh debates.

Kathy Davis

Books

Your next favorite book is out there