Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Gender Studies

"A watershed book ... an interdisciplinary array of essays highlights both the need for, and importance of, rights of passage to mark important transitions in our lives." -- Thresholds

This volume provides an engaging interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender and sexual relations in the Caribbean. Essays from sociological, literary, historical, and political science approaches cover the Hispanic-, French-, and English-speaking Caribbean areas and address topics such as sexuality, homosexuality, culture, the body, the status of women, and the wider social relations that inform these subjects.

Contents

Exploring the Intersections...

Lynn Chancer advances the provocative thesis that sadomasochism is far more prevalent in contemporary societies like the United States than we realize. According to Chancer, sexual sadomasochism is only the best-known manifestation of what is actually a much more broadly based social phenomenon. Moving from personal relationships to school, the workplace, and other interactions, Chancer uses a variety of examples that are linked by a recurrent pattern of behavior. She goes beyond the predominantly individualistic and psychological explanations generally associated with sadomasochism...

In the struggle over affirmative action, no employment setting has seen more friction than urban fire departments. Thirty years of legal and political efforts have opened the doors of this historically white male preserve, but men of color have yet to consolidate their gains, and women's progress has been even more tenuous. In this unique and compelling account of affirmative action at the "street level," Carol Chetkovich explores the ways in which this program has succeeded and failed.

Chetkovich follows the men and women of the Oakland Fire Department Class 1-91 through their academy...

From the moment intersexuality-the condition of having physical gender markers (genitals, gonads, or chromosomes) that are neither clearly female nor male-is suspected and diagnosed, social institutions are mobilized in order to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. Infants' bodies are altered, and what was "ambiguous" is made "normal." Kessler's interviews with pediatric surgeons and endocrinologists reveal how the intersex condition is normalized for parents and she argues that the way in which intersexuality is managed by the medical and psychological professions...

What roles should midwives play within our healthcare system? Must they have certified degrees and be under the jurisdiction of a professional board? Do notions of gender create competition and erect barriers between the medical professions? The Rhetoric of Midwifery offers new insights into understanding these questions within the context of our present-day medical system.

As a point of departure, Mary M. Lay analyzes the public discussion over non-academically trained-or direct-entry-midwives within Minnesota. From 1991-1995, that state held public hearings about the...

Biology at Work brings an evolutionary perspective to bear on issues of women in the workplace: the "glass ceiling," the "gender gap" in pay, sexual harassment, and occupational segregation. While acknowledging the role of discrimination and sexist socialization, Browne suggests that until we factor real biological differences between men and women into the equation, the...

What can neighborhood baseball tell us about class and gender cultures, urban change, and the ways that communities value public space? Through a close exploration of a boys baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life. Based on years of ethnographic observation and interviews with children, parents, and coaches, Protecting Home offers an analysis of the factors that account for racial accommodation in a space that was...

In Haunted Bodies, Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson have brought together some of our most highly regarded southern historians and literary critics to consider race, gender, and texts through three centuries and from a wealth of vantage points. Works as diversive as eighteenth-century court petitions and lyrics of 1970s rock music demonstrate how definitions of southern masculinity and femininity have been subject to bewildering shifts and disabling contradictions for centuries.

The pathbreaking essays in this collection explore the history of consumption by synthesizing discrete historical literatures on consumer culture, gender, and the history of technology. Luxury hotels and the chocolate industry are among the diverse array of topics these authors use to demonstrate that consumption is both a material and a cultural process. Production and consumption become equally inextricable under close analysis. Tools from both the history of technology and gender studies illuminate how these categories intersect. Although broad social and technological trends influence...