Since the beginnings of monotheism, religion has seemed to be at war with sexuality and with women. From the crusades of Hebrew prophets against the fertility deities of Canaan, to contemporary Catholic campaigns against contraception and homosexuality, to the suppression of women in Islam, Western religions have demonized both Eros and femininity. In Socrates and Diotima, Andrea Nye draws on the teaching of Socrates's priestly mentor in "matters of love" in the Symposium to recover the sacred Eros that constitutes in many pre-monotheist religious traditions a transcendent spark of...

Reading, Feminism and Spirituality tackles the often tricky relationship between feminism and religion. Through wide-ranging analysis, Dawn Llewellyn explores the generational and secular meanings of the feminist "wave" metaphor, highlighting the disconnections it creates between feminist cohorts, and feminist studies and religious feminisms. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, she uses women's spiritual reading practices to uncover new commonalities between second and third wave, and sacred and secular, experiences. Her lively approach highlights the importance of reading cultures in...

In her latest book, Gillian Howie offers a bold new way to make sense of the relationship between feminist theory and capitalism. This exciting combination of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory delivers a proactive feminism ready to respond to the challenges presented by our thoroughly modern times.

Through a series of close readings of most of Rousseau's major writings, this book provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century philosopher's sexual politics. The text argues that Rousseau's writings provide a critique of not only normative gender identity, but also normative familial and kinship relations.

In the current English-language publication market, this book is one of the earliest academic monographs to comparatively investigate different feminist scholars and academic feminism across the Taiwan Strait.

Hind draws on poetry, short stories, plays, novels, photographs, personal correspondence, advertising, and interviews to make visible the anti-feminine tendencies in femmenism and to imagine a femmenism that will appeal to the next generation of women.

Jane Flax argues that a reciprocal relationship exists between unconscious processes and race/gender domination and that unless we attend to these unconscious processes, no adequate remedy for the malignant consequences of our current race/gender practices and relations can be devised. Flax supports her arguments using a variety of sources.

Includes bibliographical references and index (p. [181]-187) and index.

Interweaving phenomenological, hermeneutical, and sociopolitical analyses, this book considers the ways in which feminists conceptualize and produce the temporalities of feminism, including the time of the trace, narrative time, calendar time, and generational time.