Issues related to gender and sexual diversity in schools can generate a lot of controversy, with many educators and youth advocates under-prepared to... address these topics in their school communities. This text offers an easy-to-read introduction to the subject, providing readers with definitions and research evidence, as well as the historical context for understanding the roots of bias in schools related to sex, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, the book offers tangible resources and advice on how to create more equitable learning environments. Topics such as working with same-sex parented families in elementary schools; integrating gender and sexual diversity topics into the curriculum; addressing homophobic bullying and sexual harassment; advising gay-straight alliances; and supporting a transgender or gender non-conforming student are addressed. The suggestions offered by this book are based on recent research evidence and legal decisions to help educators handle the various situations professionally and from an ethical and legally defensible perspective.

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality offers a fresh take on the importance of these concepts in modern society. It provides an... insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to wider social concerns throughout the world and presenting a comprehensive yet readable summary of recent research and theory.In an accessible and engaging style, the book demonstrates how thinking about gender and sexuality can illuminate and enliven other contemporary sociological debates about social structure, social change, and culture and identity politics. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of gendered and sexual lives in different parts of the world. The book offers detailed coverage of wide-ranging topics, from international sex-tourism to celebrity culture, from gender in the work-place to new sexual lifestyles, drawing examples from everyday life. By demonstrating the links between gender and sexuality this book makes a clear case for thinking sociologically about these important and controversial aspects of human identity and behaviour. The book will be of great value to students in any discipline looking to understand the roles gender and sexuality play in our lives.

Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that philosophers, writers, parents, doctors,... and ordinary people of all descriptions have left reams of historical evidence on the subject. Moreover, China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. Sexual desire and sexual activity were viewed as innate human needs, essential to bodily health and well-being, and universal marriage and reproduction served the state by supplying tax-paying subjects, duly bombarded with propaganda about family values. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? In this wonderfully written and enthralling book, Susan Mann answers that question by focusing in turn on state policy, ideas about the physical body, and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bar; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

This is the first book to focus directly on gender in Amazonia for nearly thirty years. Research on gender and sexual identity has become central to... social science during that time, but studies have concentrated on other places and people, leaving the gendered experiences of indigenous Amazonians relatively unexplored.McCallum explores little-known aspects of the day-to-day lives of Amazonian peoples in Brazil and Peru. Taking a closer look at the lives of the Cashinahua people, the book provides fascinating insights into conception, pregnancy and birth; naming rituals and initiation ceremonies; concepts of space and time; community and leadership; exchange and production practices; and the philosophy of daily life itself. Through this prism it shows that in fact gender is not merely an aspect of Amazonian social life, but its central axis and driving force. Gender does not just affect personal identity, but has implications for the whole of community life and social organization. The author illustrates how gender is continually created and maintained, and how social forms emerge from the practices of gendered persons in interaction. Throughout their lives, people are 'being made' in this part of the Amazon, and the whole of social organization is predicated on this conception. The author reveals the complex inter-relationships that link gender distinctions with the body, systems of exchange and politics. In so doing, she develops a specific theoretical model of gender and sociality that reshapes our understanding of Amazonian social processes. Building on the key works from past decades, this book challenges and extends current understandings of gender, society and the indigenous people of Amazonia.

Do men and women experience participation in social movements differently? Are gender roles reproduced or undermined during a struggle for liberation?... In this brief text examining gender roles in social movements, M. Bahati Kuumba shows how liberation struggles are viewed through women's eyes and how gender affects women's mobilization, strategies, and outcomes in social movement organizations. Using two well-known examples, the American civil rights movement and the South African national liberation movement, Kuumba documents the circumscribed roles of women, the unheralded role of movement leaders such as Ella Baker and Frances Baard, and how gender affected movement activities and results. Gender and Social Movements is the ideal text to introduce a sophisticated view of race and gender into social movement courses.

For most of human experience, certainly of late, the artifacts of technological civilization have become closely associated with gender, sometimes for... physiological reasons (brassieres or condoms, for example) but more often because of social and cultural factors, both obvious and obscure. Because these stereotypes necessarily have economic, social, and political consequences, understanding how gender shapes the ways we view and use technology—and how technology shapes our concept of gender—has emerged as a matter of serious scholarly importance. Gender and Technology brings together leading historians of technology to explore this entwined and reciprocal relationship, focusing on the tools (cars, typewriters, computers, vibrators), industries (dressmaking, steam laundering, cigar making, meat packing) and places (factories, offices, homes) of North America between 1850 and 1950. Together, these essays reveal the ways in which technology and gender—far from being essential, immutable categories—develop historically as social constructions.Contributors: Patricia Cooper, University of Kentucky; Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan; Wendy Gamber, Indiana University; Carolyn M. Goldstein, Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, Massachusetts; Rebecca Herzig, Bates College; Roger Horowitz, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware; Ronald R. Kline, Cornell University; Jennifer Light, Northwestern University; Rachel P. Maines, Cornell University's Hotel School Library; Judith A. McGaw; Joy Parr, Simon Fraser University.

Set in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes,... why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism. Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times. This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation.

Written in a clear and accessible style, with lots of examples from Anglo-American media, Gender and the Media offers a critical introduction to the... study of gender in the media, and an up-to-date assessment of the key issues and debates. Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessment the book explores the contradictory character of contemporary gender representations, where confident expressions of girl power sit alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among young women, moral panics about the impact on men of idealized representations of the 'six-pack', but near silence about the pervasive re-sexualization of women's bodies, along with a growing use of irony and playfulness that render critique extremely difficult. The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique. Gender and the Media is also concerned with the theoretical tools available for analysing representations. A range of approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory are discussed, and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash, and positive images are for making sense of gender in today's Western media. Finally, Gender and the Media also raises questions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critique and intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotation marks seem to protect much media content from criticism and when much media content - from Sex and the City to revenge adverts - can be labelled postfeminist. This is a book that will be of particular interest to students and scholars in gender and media studies, as well as those in sociology and cultural studies more generally.

A classic in gender studies in music, Marcia J. Citron's comprehensive, balanced work lays a broad foundation for the study of women composers and their... music. Drawing on a diverse body of feminist and interdisciplinary theory, Citron shows how the western art canon is not intellectually pure but the result of a complex mixture of attitudes, practices, and interests that often go unacknowledged and unchallenged. Winner of the Pauline Alderman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, "Gender and the Musical Canon" explores important elements of canon formation, such as notions of creativity, professionalism, and reception. Citron surveys the institutions of power, from performing organizations and the academy to critics and the publishing and recording industries, that affect what goes into the canon and what is kept out. She also documents the nurturing role played by women, including mothers, in cultivating female composers. In a new introduction, she assesses the book's reception by composers and critics, especially the reactions to her controversial reading of Cecille Chaminade's sonata for piano. A key volume in establishing how the concepts and assumptions that form the western art music canon affect female composers and their music, "Gender and the Musical Canon" also reveals how these dynamics underpin many of the major issues that affect musicology as a discipline.

History is not just about great personalities, wars, and revolutions; it is also about the subtle aspects of more ordinary matters. On a day-to-day... basis the aspects of life that most preoccupied people in late eighteenth- through mid nineteenth-century Mexico were not the political machinations of generals or politicians but whether they themselves could make a living, whether others accorded them the respect they deserved, whether they were safe from an abusive husband, whether their wives and children would obey them—in short, the minutiae of daily life.Sonya Lipsett-Rivera’s Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 explores the relationships between Mexicans, their environment, and one another, as well as their negotiation of the cultural values of everyday life. By examining the value systems that governed Mexican thinking of the period, Lipsett-Rivera examines the ephemeral daily experiences and interactions of the people and illuminates how gender and honor systems governed these quotidian negotiations. Bodies and the built environment were inscribed with cultural values, and the relationship of Mexicans to and between space and bodies determined the way ordinary people acted out their culture.

Winner, in the original edition, of the 1989 Joan Kelly Prize of the American Historical Association, this landmark work from a renowned feminist... historian is a trenchant critique of women's history and gender inequality. Exploring topics ranging from language and gender to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a crucial interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis.The revised edition -- in addition to providing a new generation of readers with access to a classic text in feminist theory and history -- reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In provocatively arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book.

Gender and the Politics of Possibilities explores the lesser-known side of globalization beyond the effects of national governments and multinational... cooperations by taking a look at grassroots movements by women that have and continue to shape globalization today. Manisha Desai highlights the significant role that women play in cross-border trade in Africa, in transborder activism on issues that affect women, and in cultural change and social justice.

How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific... claims about differences between "male" and "female" brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires and behaviors? Gender and the Science of Difference examines how contemporary science shapes and is shaped by gender ideals and images. Prior scholarship has illustrated how past cultures of science were infused with patriarchal norms and values that influenced the kinds of research that was conducted and the interpretation of findings about differences between men and women. This interdisciplinary volume presents empirical inquiries into today's science, including examples of gendered scientific inquiry and medical interventions and research. It analyzes how scientific and medical knowledge produces gender norms through an emphasis on sex differences, and includes both U.S. and non-U.S. cases and examples.

In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and... femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war.Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women—black and white—on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.

Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore consider the interface between the social institutions of gender and Western medicine in this brief, lively textbook.... They offer a distinct feminist viewpoint to analyze issues of power and politics concerning physical illness. SIGNS labeled the first edition 'a rich and imaginative work.' In the extensively revised second edition of this successful text, the authors add chapters on disability and genital surgeries. They also update and expand their discussions of social epidemiology, AIDS, the health professions, PMS, menopause, and feminist health care. For a creative, feminist-oriented alternative to traditional texts on medical sociology, medical anthropology, and the history of medicine, this is an ideal choice.