Kessler and McKenna convincingly argue that gender is not a reflection of biological reality but rather a social construct that varies across cultures.... Valuable for its insights into gender, its extensive treatment of transsexualism, and its ethnomethodological approach, Gender reviews and critiques data from biology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

The first gender reader in UK to focus on sociological perspectives, this book offers students an informed overview of some of the most significant... sociological work on gender produced over the last three decades. Edited by leading authorities, the readings cover both theoretical and empirical work representing a range of perspectives, and each section includes segments addressing the intersection of gender with differences of 'race', class and sexuality. Forty-eight readings are organised into six sections:* gender and knowledge* class, gender and the labour market* paid and unpaid work* marriage and intimate relationships* gendered embodiment.In order to guide students through the issues, the book has a substantial critical introduction exploring the history of sociological analyses of gender, as well as introductions to each section, editorial commentary on the readings themselves, suggestions for further reading and questions for discussion. Clearly and concisely written, this comprehensive reader is a valuable reference source for students of sociology, gender and women’s studies.

This is the first broad-based anthology to look exclusively at gender and gender relations. Feminist in approach, the topics and writings focus on the... experiential basics of students' lives. The articles are varied but offer unity in that raising one issue brings to mind other articles in the collection. Minas includes writings by thoughtful men and women who exhibit awareness in reacting to the feminist perspective.

''In this smart, brave book Elizabeth Meyer speaks clearly and sensibly about differences that make a difference in children's school lives.''-- From... the Foreword by Lyn Mikel Brown, Professor of Education, Colby College; author of Girfighting ''Bullying and harassment remain serious impediments to learning for far too many students. In this thoughtful book, Dr. Meyer helps readers understand why this troubling behavior occurs and persists, and offers clear and easy-to-implement action steps for both individuals and institutions that are truly committed to creating environments where everyone can learn.''-- Kevin Jennings, Founder, The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)''In an accessible, yet theoretically sound manner, Meyer creates a discourse which defines, identifies, and mentors us in tackling the insidious affects of bullying and harassment.''-- Shirley R. Steinberg, Academic Director, The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy''Meyer's work moves the bullying discussion far beyond worry, fear, and ignorance--she demands that we contextually understand both the cause and effects involved in this societal ill, then instructs us in efforts to end it.''-- Joe L. Kincheloe, Canada Research Chair, McGill UniversityWhile there have been countless studies of bullying and harassment in schools, none have examined the key gender issues related to these behaviors. In her new book, Meyer does just that and offers readers tangible and flexible suggestions to help them positively transform the culture of their school and reduce the incidences of gendered harassment. The text features sections that speak specifically to administrators, teachers, counselors, student leaders, and community and family members. Integrating research, theory, and practical ideas connected to issues of sex, gender, sexual orientation, bullying, and harassment, this timely book:* Defines important terms, such as bullying, (hetero)sexual harassment, sexual-orientation harassment, and harassment because of gender nonconformity.* Provides an easy-to-read overview of the legal issues involved in addressing gender and harassment in schooling.* Offers an annotated list of educational resources on homophobia, sexual harassment, and bullying, as well as a detailed checklist of steps to aid educators reduce gendered harassment in their schools.

Through the ethnography of a Catholic community in Northeast Brazil, Maya Mayblin offers a vivid and provocative rethink of gendered portrayals of... Catholic life. For the residents of Santa Lucia, life is conceptualized as a series of moral tradeoffs between the sinful and productive world against an idealized state of innocence, conceived with reference to local Catholic teachings. As marriage marks the beginning of a productive life in the world, it also marks a phase in which moral personhood comes most actively—and poignantly—to the fore. This book offers lucid observations on how men and women as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, negotiate this challenge. As well as making an important contribution to the ethnographic literature on morality, Christianity, and Latin America, the book offers a compelling alternative to received portrayals of gender polarity as symbolically all-encompassing, throughout the Catholic world.

Gender Circuits explores the impact of new technologies on the gendered lives of individuals through substantive sociological analysis and in-depth case... studies. Examining the complex intersections between gender ideologies, social scripts, information and biomedical technologies, and embodied identities, this book explores whether and how new technologies are reshaping what it means to be a gendered person in contemporary society.

Gender-Class Equality in Political Economies offers an in-depth analysis of gender-class equality across six countries to reveal why gender-class... equality in paid and unpaid work remains elusive, and what more policy might do to achieve better social and economic outcomes. This book is the first to meld cross-time with cross-country comparisons, link macro structures to micro behavior, and connect class with gender dynamics to yield fresh insights into where we are on the road to gender equality, why it varies across industrialized countries, and the barriers to further progress.

In the early 1970s, when women’s history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a... middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume.  Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women’s lives, and men’s.These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women’s studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women’s history.

This new text offers a unique developmental focus on gender. Gender development is examined from infancy through adolescence, integrating biological,... socialization, and cognitive perspectives. The book’s current empirical focus is complemented by a lively and readable style that includes anecdotes about children’s everyday experiences. The book’s accessibility is further enhanced with the use of bold face to highlight key terms when first introduced along with a complete glossary of these terms. All three of the authors are respected researchers in divergent areas of children’s gender role development and each of them teaches a course on the topic. The book’s primary focus is on gender role behaviors – how they develop and the roles biological and experiential factors play in their development. The first section of the text introduces the field and outlines its history. Part 2 focuses on the differences between the sexes, including the biology of sex and the latest research on behavioral sex differences, including motor and cognitive behaviors and personality and social behaviors. Contemporary theoretical perspectives on gender development – biological, social and environmental, and cognitive approaches – are explored in Part 3 along with the research supporting these models. The social agents of gender development, including children themselves, family, peers, the media, and schools are addressed in the final part. Cutting-edge and comprehensive, this is the perfect text for those who have been searching for an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate book for courses in gender development, the psychology of sex roles and/or gender and/or women or men, taught in departments of psychology, human development, and educational psychology. Although chapters have been designed to be read sequentially, a full author citation is included the first time a reference is used within an individual chapter rather than only the first time it is used in the book, making it easy to assign chapters in a variety of orders. This referencing system will also appeal to scholars interested in using the book as a resource to review a particular content area.

How can we gain new understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality? What are the relationships between culture and gender diversity? How has the... diffusion of Euro-American culture affected the sex/gender ideologies of non-European cultures? This eye-opening account of the differences in how sex/gender diversity is experienced in seven cultures raises our consciousness and challenges our intellectual understandings and attitudes about what we consider natural, normal, and morally right. Nanda's examples, which reveal the complexity of social responses toward sex/gender diversity, are ethnographically well documented and represent various geographical areas and sex/gender ideologies. In classic anthropological fashion, Nanda's text enables us to cross the barriers of cultural difference to a recognition of a greater shared humanity.

Designed for undergraduate students, Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives, Second Edition, is a concise textbook/reader that provides a critical and... multifaceted approach to the study of gendered bodies. Acclaimed scholars Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore analyze the construction of gendered bodies in different contexts. Exploring a broad range of both long-established and more cutting-edge topics in feminist studies, Lorber and Moore present scholarly research, offer information on relevant laws and political events, and point to directions for social change.Gendered Bodies, Second Edition, focuses on key themes that reveal how gendered relations, ideologies, and practices shape human bodies. At the same time, it shows how human bodies are linked to other significant axes of inequality based on racial ethnic group, disability, sexuality, class, culture, religion, age, and nation. Thoroughly updated throughout, the second edition incorporates sixteen new selections--including non-Western perspectives--on such fascinating topics as evolution and motherhood; breastfeeding; breast cancer; the effects of height on men; job discrimination and transgendered people; world champion runner Caster Semenya and sex verification; disability, gender, and embodiment; and Palestinian female suicide bombers. It also adds new references and a concluding chapter, "Social Bodies in an Interconnected World."Gendered Bodies, Second Edition, is ideal for courses on the body, feminist theory, women and health, and the sociology of gender. Each chapter includes a list of key concepts, three readings, and suggested readings. The book also includes an appendix of class exercises.

Focusing on African and European women and men, five articles explore generational conflict, connections between representation and violence, the... incorporation of gendered power into state formation, memory and forgetting, and consumption and commodity cultures.

With this book, Karin Rosemblatt presents a gendered history of the politics and political compromise that emerged in Chile during the 1930s and 1940s,... when reformist popular-front coalitions held power. While other scholars have focused on the economic realignments and novel political pacts that characterized Chilean politics during this era, Rosemblatt explores how gender helped shape Chile's evolving national identity.Rosemblatt examines how and why the aims of feminists, socialists, labor activists, social workers, physicians, and political leaders converged around a shared gender ideology. Tracing the complex negotiations surrounding the implementation of new labor, health, and welfare policies, she shows that professionals in health and welfare agencies sought to regulate gender and sexuality within the working class and to consolidate the male-led nuclear family as the basis of societal stability. Leftists collaborated in these efforts because they felt that strong family bonds would generate a sense of class belonging and help unify the Left, while feminists perceived male familial responsibility as beneficial for women. Diverse actors within civil society thus reworked the norms of masculinity and femininity developed by state agencies and political leaders—even as others challenged those ideals.

Virtually all anthropologists undertaking fieldwork experience emotional difficulties in relating their own personal culture to the field culture. The... issue of gender arises because ethnographers do fieldwork by establishing relationships, and this is done as a person of a particular age, sexual orientation, belief, educational background, ethnic identity and class. In particular it is done as men and women. Gendered Fields examines and explores the progress of feminist anthropology, the gendered nature of fieldwork itself, and the articulation of gender with other aspects of the self of the ethnographer.

In May 1862, hundreds of African-Americans freed themselves in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and in the process destroyed the South's fundamental... structure of power--the plantation household. Yet at the moment of freedom, southerners did not discard what they knew. Instead, blacks and whites, men and women constructed competing visions of freedom based on their particular understanding of household authority. Gendered Freedoms explores this first generation of freedom and presents an intimate history of the political consciousness of the franchised and disenfranchised during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Mississippi Delta. Gendered Freedoms is the first book to analyze black and white southerners' subjective understandings of the household, challenging us to reexamine the relationship between identity and political consciousness. Where others emphasize the household principally as a structure based on an ideology of power, Bercaw demonstrates how deeply household hierarchies permeated southerners' most personal sense of themselves, shaping their perceptions of their autonomy, rights, duties, and obligations to one another. The author highlights the importance of African-American and white women and integrates them into her analysis to reveal political consciousness in both its public and its private dimensions. The first to uncover these largely unheard-of voices of the region, the author investigates the conservative and radical traditions embodied in southern dissent. In order to capture the personal perspectives of individual southerners, the author mines a variety of archival collections from the Freedmen's Bureau and U.S. Army records. These sources--governors' papers, letters, and diaries, as well as local newspapers, which record the public and private responses of southern white men and women to war and emancipation--provide rare insight into how black men and women defined and contested the meaning of freedom within their households and communities. The end product is an intimate window into the lives of individuals in the Delta from 1861 to 1875, as they explored the nature of political rights from their vantage points of whiteness and blackness, manhood and womanhood, freedom and dependency.