This series is aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in the area of gender studies. It discusses topics such as gender labour markets and social policy, women and families in Costa Rica, and economic development, patriarchy, and intrahousehold dynamics.

The contributors to this volume, the third in the series, refine ideas that have been part of the conceptual toolkit of gender scholarship from its inception, identifying new challenges to and new applications for the concepts of the public/private dichotomy and of patriarchy.

In this volume, 15 feminist scholars from five continents, who participated in the 1998 conference co-sponsored by Research Committee 32, Women in Society, of the International Sociological Association (WISISA) and the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University, consider, critique and construct theories of society. Their papers examine four inter-related themes: an explicit or implicit acknowledgment and critique of the European Enlightenment as a basis for the modern production of knowledge; the use and utility of gender as a concept; problems and solutions in feminist...

Exploring gender, health and medicine, this collection of essays asserts that medicine is a gendered and class-structured institution. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a critique of exclusively biomedical approaches to personal and public health, and calls for more sociological input, qualitative research and an intersectional approach to help us understand various aspects of health and illness. personal and social problems, the commodification of healthcare, and questions of agency, responsibility and control on the parts of recipients and dispensers of healthcare. Six of the seven essays...

This volume offers feminist perspectives on the social, cultural and medical aspects of women as sexual beings and of their fertility, pregnancy and child bearing. It serves as a companion to Advances in Gender Research volume 7, Gender perspectives on Health and Medicine: Key Themes. As in the previous volume, the authors critique and transcend conventional biomedical approaches to the subject matter. The seven essays raise questions about control and agency asking who decides if, when and how fertility should be controlled and the circumstances under which child birth takes place. They...

The ten papers in Gender Realities: Local and Global document the types of work in which women engage, and gender equity issues they face. They show both the importance of considering the uniqueness of cultural contexts for understanding and resolving problems and how global interdependence affects local gender realities. The papers fall into two broad and overlapping categories: gender, work and development, and gender and discrimination. Papers related to particular settings focus on the resettlement of villagers in Lesotho, the development of welfare policies in Puerto...

The nine papers in this volume have a world in which the local/global connection is salient as background. Examining gender and its implications for feminist action within this setting, they fall into three overlapping categories. The first, theory, involves the theoretical consideration of gender across place and time. The second, research, reveals cultural differences in attitudes toward gender, and the third, action, concerns the feminist implications of gender as hierarchy.

Disciplines represented include archaeology, cultural anthropology, sociology, and urban studies....

This volume illuminates the encounter of feminist activism with scholarship in political science, cultural studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and economics. The essays contribute images of the forces that lead to the development of many different kinds of feminisms and women??'s movements across the globe in the 20th century and recently. They explore the cultural constructions and legitimations of sustainability during the processes through which various agents interpret the relevance of feminisms for their social and political initiatives. The volume offers new dimensions on the...

Advances in gender research is a new series aimed at presenting current methodological and theoretical research in an area of rapid change and with a subject which is interdisciplinary spanning the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. of the variety of material and the approach. The authors take various positions within the configuration which include liberal, radical and material feminisms. The pieces also vary in the extent to which the authors' theoretical orientation and ideas about social change are implicit or explicit. ranging from an examination of the everyday world...

Considers policy implications of gender research placing an emphasis on its relevance for children-particularly girls; and gender inequality within a range of contexts from that of Cameroon society where basic education is an issue, to that of feminist family settings in the United States.