Unsettling Things

As a field of scholarship, gender and politics has exploded over the last fifty years and is now global, institutionalized, and ever expanding. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics brings to political science an accessible and comprehensive overview of the key contributions of genderscholars to the study of politics and shows how these contributions produce a richer understanding of polities and societies.

In this interdisciplinary collection of articles by internationally recognized feminist scholars, the authors examine efforts to apply feminist principles to the research act. Each stage of the research process is examined, from sampling techniques to mass media packaging and marketing of feminist research.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay on the male gaze, ushering in a new era in understanding the politics and theory of looking at the female body.

What happens to art when feminism grips the curatorial imagination? How do sexual politics become realised as exhibits? Is the struggle against gender discrimination compatible with the aspirations of museums led by market values? Beginning with the feminist critique of the art exhibition inthe 1970s and concluding with reflections on intersectional curating and globalisation after 2000, this pioneering collection offers an alternative narrative of feminism's impact on art.

Continuing her feminist reconceptualisation of the ways we can experience and study the visual arts, world renowned art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock proposes a series of new encounters through virtual exhibitions with art made by women over the twentieth century.

- Features work by an impressive list of international female designers. Besides the internationally famous names, it also considers the women behind the scenes of many fashion houses, whose far-reaching influence is something that has been completely overlooked in fashion history.

Borrowing from Our Foremothers offers a panorama of women's struggles through artifacts to establish connections between the generations of women's right activists.

Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism"--the politics and social practices associated with handmaking--Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.

In Earth Muse, Carol Bigwood describes what she sees as a suppression of the feminine in Western culture, technology, and philosophy and opens a feminist postmodern space from which new differences may emerge.

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth.