Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference
Author: Linell E. Cady
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231162480

Global struggles over women’s roles, rights, and dress have taken center stage in a drama that casts the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. Advocates for equality speak of the issue in terms of rights and modern progress while reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals. Both sides presume women’s emancipation is tied to secularization. This volume upsets these certainties by blending diverse voices and traditions, both secular and religious, in studies historicizing, questioning, and testing the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than treat secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, these essays show how it structures the conditions generating them.

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor
Author: Gina Schouten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2019-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192542451

This book defends progressive political interventions to erode the gendered division of labor as legitimate exercises of coercive political power. The gendered division of labor is widely regarded as the linchpin of gender injustice. The process of gender equalization in domestic and paid labor allocations has stalled, and a growing number of scholars argue that, absent political intervention, further eroding of the gendered division of labor will not be forthcoming anytime soon. Certain political interventions could jumpstart the stalled gender revolution, but beyond their prospects for effectiveness, such interventions stand in need of another kind of justification. In a diverse, liberal state, reasonable citizens will disagree about what makes for a good life and a good society. Because a fundamental commitment of liberalism is to limit political intrusion into the lives of citizens and allow considerable space for those citizens to act on their own conceptions of the good, questions of legitimacy arise. Legitimacy concerns the constraints we must abide by as we seek collective political solutions to our shared social problems, given that we will disagree, reasonably, both about what constitutes a problem and about what costs we should be willing to incur to fix it. The interventions in question would effectively subsidize gender egalitarian lifestyles at a cost to those who prefer to maintain a traditional gendered division of labor. In a pluralistic, liberal society where many citizens reasonably resist the feminist agenda, can we legitimately use scarce public resources to finance coercive interventions to subsidize gender egalitarianism? This book argues that they can, and moreover, that they can even by the lights of political liberalism, a particularly demanding theory of liberal legitimacy.

Women Don't Ask

Women Don't Ask
Author: Linda Babcock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691210535

The groundbreaking classic that explores how women can and should negotiate for parity in their workplaces, homes, and beyond When Linda Babcock wanted to know why male graduate students were teaching their own courses while female students were always assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women in different fields and at all stages in their careers, Women Don't Ask explores how our institutions, child-rearing practices, and implicit assumptions discourage women from asking for the opportunities and resources that they have earned and deserve—perpetuating inequalities that are fundamentally unfair and economically unsound. Women Don't Ask tells women how to ask, and why they should.

The Feminism of Uncertainty

The Feminism of Uncertainty
Author: Ann Snitow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822375672

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.

Water Security Across the Gender Divide

Water Security Across the Gender Divide
Author: Christiane Fröhlich
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319640461

This book examines water security as a prime example of how the economic, socio-cultural and political-normative systems that regulate access to water reflect the evolving and gendered power relations between different societal groups. Access to water is characterized by inequalities: it depends not only on natural water availability, but also on the respective socio-political context. It is regulated by gender-differentiated roles and responsibilities towards the resource, which are strongly influenced by, among others, tradition, religion, customary law, geographical availability, as well as the historical and socio-political context. While gender has been recognized as a key intervening variable in achieving equitable water access, most studies fail to acknowledge the deep interrelations between social structures and patterns of water use. Proof of these shortcomings is the enduring lack of data on water accessibility, availability and utilization that sufficiently acknowledges the relational nature of gender and other categories of power and difference, like class and socioeconomic status, as well as their comprehensive analysis. This book addresses this major research gap.

Divided Houses

Divided Houses
Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 442
Release: 1992
Genre: Sex role
ISBN: 0195080343

Divided Houses is the first book to show how the Civil War transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among Americans. This unique volume brings together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints by newly emerging scholars as well as distinguished authors in the field to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, from new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers, to women's roles in the guerrilla fighting, to the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects within an overall historical context. Divided House sheds new light on the entire Civil War experience, demonstrating how themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality interacted to forge the beginnings of a new society.

Challenging the Public/private Divide

Challenging the Public/private Divide
Author: Susan B. Boyd
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780802076526

Feminist scholars in disciplines ranging from law to geography challenge our traditional notion of a public/private divide in legal and public policy in Canada and internationally

Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry

Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry
Author: Julie Prescott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Sex discrimination in employment
ISBN: 9781466645349

While women maintain an increased visibility in the games culture, the issues involving gender in computing gaming is still relevant; and it is evident that the industry could benefit from the involvement of women in all aspects from consumer to developer. Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry takes a look at the games industry from a gendered perspective and highlights the variety of ways in which women remain underrepresented in this industry. This reference source provides a comprehensive overview on the issue of gender, computer games, and the ICT sector. It supplies students and academics in numerous disciplines with the concerns of the computer games industry, male dominated occupations, and the complexity of gender in the workforce.

Sex and Secularism

Sex and Secularism
Author: Joan Wallach Scott
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691197229

"Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description

Dividing the Domestic

Dividing the Domestic
Author: Judith Treas
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804773742

In Dividing the Domestic, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of "who does what" needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.