Virtual Library

Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities’ explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the “biopolitics of racial innocence,” a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves.

The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women’s bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women’s liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women’s relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women’s access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women’s bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood.

Enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) is growing among donors and NGOs throughout the global reproductive health field. There is an emerging concern, however, that the push to insert these methods has not been accompanied by a commensurate push for access to method removal. We use data from 17 focus group discussions with women of reproductive age in an anonymized African setting to understand how users approach providers to request method removal, and how they understand whether or not such a request will be granted. Focus group participants described how providers took on a gatekeeping role to removal services, adjudicating which requests for LARC removal they deemed legitimate enough to be granted. Participants reported that providers often did not consider a simple desire to discontinue the method to be a good enough reason to remove LARC, nor the experience of painful side-effects. Respondents discussed the deployment of what we call legitimating practices, in which they marshalled social support, medical evidence, and other resources to convince providers that their request for removal was indeed serious enough to be honored. This analysis examines the starkly gendered nature of contraceptive coercion, in which women are expected to bear the brunt of contraceptive side-effects, while men are expected to tolerate no inconvenience at all, even vicarious. This evidence of contraceptive coercion and medical misogyny demonstrates the need to center contraceptive autonomy not only at the time of method provision, but at the time of desired discontinuation as well.

Since its conception, Understanding Human Sexuality has achieved distinction and success by following the science of human sexuality. The first of the modern sexuality textbooks, Understanding Human Sexuality introduced this topic to students through the science that has uncovered what we know about the field.

Aili Mari Tripp explains why autocratic leaders in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria embraced more extensive legal reforms of women’s rights than their Middle Eastern counterparts. The study challenges existing accounts that rely primarily on religiosity to explain the adoption of women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries. Based on extensive fieldwork in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and an original database of gender-based reforms in the Middle East and North Africa, this accessible study analyzes how women’s rights are used both instrumentally and symbolically to advance the political goals of authoritarian regimes as leverage in attempts to side-line religious extremists.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women’s speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre’s political potential lies in the authors’ creation of bodyminds that transcend reality’s limitations.

Many advocates of all-black male schools (ABMSs) argue that these institutions counter black boys’ racist emasculation in white, “overly” female classrooms. This argument challenges racism and perpetuates antifeminism.

Keisha Lindsay explains the complex politics of ABMSs by situating these schools within broader efforts at neoliberal education reform and within specific conversations about both “endangered” black males and a “boy crisis” in education.

In Daughters of the Trade, Pernille Ipsen follows five generations of marriages between African women and Danish men, revealing how interracial marriage created a Euro-African hybrid culture specifically adapted to the Atlantic slave trade.

The book explains an unexpected consequence of the decrease in conflict in Africa after the 1990s. Analysis of cross-national data and in-depth comparisons of case studies of Uganda, Liberia and Angola show that post-conflict countries have significantly higher rates of women’s political representation in legislatures and government compared with countries that have not undergone major conflict.

Theorizing vision and power with the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution. It demonstrates that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training.

How South Asian American women have found expression and power in festival dances and theater

An argument for bringing transgender studies into women’s studies departments and an exploration of the impact of trans issues in various aspects of higher education

In Finding the Movement, Finn Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy.

How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman’s childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions.