Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than actors in the crimes they commit. Morrissey argues that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human.

Is it possible that changes in rhetorical practice could alter not just how thought is expressed, but also how it is made? By a close stylistic and rhetorical analysis across contemporary feminist writing - from the cultural theory of Judith Butler to the newspaper journalism of Naomi Wolf - Lynne Pearce demonstrates how feminist thought is created as well as communicated by the frameworks in which it is presented. In linking rhetorical innovation with feminist epistemology in such a direct way, Pearce provides a book that should be of methodological interest as well as theoretical, providing...

Postcolonialism has attracted a large amount of interest in cultural theory, but the adjacent area of multiculturalism has not been scrutinized to quite the same extent. This study sets out to interrogate the ways in which the transnational discourse of multiculturalism may be related to the politics of race and indigineity, grounding the discussion in a variety of national settings and a variety of literary, autobiographical and theoretical texts. Using examples from marginal sites - the settler societies of Australia and Canada - to cast light on the globally dominant discourses of the US...

Sexing the Soldier takes a critical look at how gender - what it means to be a man or a woman - is understood within the contemporary British Army, and the political and practical consequences of this. Drawing on original research, this informaive volume looks at:

• the history and structure of the British Army as a masculine institution
• personnel policies which deal with gender issues
• the construction of ideas about military masculinities and femininities within the Army
• media representations of the figure of the soldier.

Using...

Traditionally, Euroamerican cultures have considered that human status was conferred at the conclusion to childbirth. However, in contemporary Euroamerican biomedicine, law and politics, the living subject is often claimed to pre-exist birth. In this fascinating book Lorna Weir argues that the displacement of birth as the threshold of the living subject began in the 1950s with the novel concept of 'perinatal mortality' referring to death of either the foetus or the newborn just prior to, during or after birth.

Weir's book gives a new feminist approach to pregnancy in advanced...