Gender & Women’s Studies Virtual Library

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.

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.

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

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

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.

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Out of Havana is a first-person narrative and creative non-fiction memoir that uncovers fifty years of Marxism through a myriad of human relations tangled with shocking historical events as lived by four generations of Cuban women.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Health by All Means documents the transformation of a community with, for, and by women who experience gender-based structural violence. It can be experienced as a story, a philosophy lesson, a walk with a treasured friend, and, at times, a song, and much dancing.

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.

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.