Myths of Oppression

Myths of Oppression
Author: Inci Bilgin Tekin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3838203089

Inci Bilgin Tekin's study offers a comparative perspective on two very challenging contemporary female playwrights, Liz Lochhead and Cherrie Moraga, and their Scottish and Chicanese adaptations of myths—such as the Greek Medea and Oedipus or the Mayan Popul Vuh—which address ethnic, racial, gender, and hierarchical oppression. Her book incorporates postcolonial and feminist readings of Lochhead's and Moraga's plays while it also explores different mythologies on the background. Bilgin Tekin not only introduces an original point of view on Liz Lochhead's and Cherrie Moraga's plays as adaptations or rewrites, but also calls attention to the non-canonized Scottish, Aztec, and Mayan mythologies. Following an innovative approach, she discusses the question in which ways Lochhead's and Moraga's adaptations of myths are challenges to the canon and further suggests a feminist version of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.The study appeals to readers of mythology, drama, and comparative literature. Those interested in postcolonial and feminist theories will also gain valuable new insights.

The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth
Author: Naomi Wolf
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 006196994X

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

The Equity Myth

The Equity Myth
Author: Frances Henry
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774834919

The university is often regarded as a bastion of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are promoted and racism doesn’t exist. In reality, the university still excludes many people and is a site of racialization that is subtle, complex, and sophisticated. While some studies do point to the persistence of systemic barriers to equity in higher education, in-depth analyses of racism, racialization, and Indigeneity in the academy are more notable for excluding racialized and Indigenous professors. This book is the first comprehensive, data-based study of racialized and Indigenous faculty members’ experiences in Canadian universities. Challenging the myth of equity in higher education, it brings together leading scholars who scrutinize what universities have done and question the effectiveness of their equity programs. They draw on a rich body of survey data, interviews, and analysis of universities’ stated policies to examine the experiences of racialized faculty members across Canada who – despite diversity initiatives in their respective institutions – have yet to see meaningful changes in everyday working conditions. They also make important recommendations as to how universities can address racialization and fulfill the promise of equity in higher education.

Postcolonial Love Poem

Postcolonial Love Poem
Author: Natalie Diaz
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1644451131

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

The Four Pivots

The Four Pivots
Author: Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1623175437

“Reading this courageous book feels like the beginning of a social and personal awakening...I can’t stop thinking about it.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Atlas of the Heart For readers of Emergent Strategy and Dare to Lead, an activist's roadmap to long-term social justice impact through four simple shifts. We need a fundamental shift in our values--a pivot in how we think, act, work, and connect. Despite what we’ve been told, the most critical mainspring of social change isn’t coalition building or problem analysis. It’s healing: deep, whole, and systemic, inside and out. Here, Shawn Ginwright, PhD, breaks down the common myths of social movements--a set of deeply ingrained beliefs that actually hold us back from healing and achieving sustainable systemic change. He shows us why these frames don’t work, proposing instead four revolutionary pivots for better activism and collective leadership: Awareness: from lens to mirror Connection: from transactional to transformative relationships Vision: from problem-fixing to possibility-creating Presence: from hustle to flow Supplemented with reflections, prompts, cutting-edge research, and the author’s own insights and lived experience as an African American social scientist, professor, and movement builder, The Four Pivots helps us uncover our obstruction points. It shows us how to discover new lenses and boldly assert our need for connection, transformation, trust, wholeness, and healing. It gives us permission to create a better future--to acknowledge that a broken system has been predefining our dreams and limiting what we allow ourselves to imagine, but that it doesn’t have to be that way at all. Are you ready to pivot?

Understanding Islam

Understanding Islam
Author: Farhan Iqbal
Publisher: Islam International Publications Ltd
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1989163009

The concept of Jihad in Islam is misunderstood by a large number of people, who believe that the violent and oppressive actions of extremists as portrayed by some media is a representation of the teachings of Islam. In addition, numerous articles and books have been written in popular press that, through ignorance or prejudice, misconstrue verses of the Holy Quran and events from the life of the Holy Prophet(sa) of Islam to label such brutal actions, oppression and persecution as wholly Islamic. One such book came out in 2016 that presented the same age-old arguments against Islam and its concept of Jihad. This book Understanding Islam is a response to all such allegations against Jihad and presents the pristine beauty of Islam from the teachings of Holy Quran, the life of the Holy Prophet(sa) of Islam and the discourses of the Promised Messiah, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad(as) of Qadian. It has been written jointly by members of the Review of Religions Research Canada, a group that inspires the youth towards studying the sciences of the Holy Quran.

Myths of Male Dominance

Myths of Male Dominance
Author: Eleanor Burke Leacock
Publisher:
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This classic anthropological study debunks the many myths behind the idea of "natural" male superiority.

Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth

Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth
Author: Lillian Doherty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472502396

Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and folklorist. She also explores 'popular' uses of classical mythology - from television and comic books to the evocation of goddesses in Jungian psychology.