Showing titles in Gender Studies

When our expectations are met and things go according to plan, we feel a sense of accomplishment; we feel safe, in control, and on track. But when life does not live up to our expectations, we end up with an Expectation Hangover. This particular brand of disappointment is profoundly uncomfortable and can cost us valuable time and energy if not treated and leveraged effectively. Christine Hassler has broken down the complex and overwhelming experience of recovering from disappointment into a step-by-step treatment plan.

The Insecure Girl's Handbook will guide you through your insecurity no matter what life stage you're at, pointing out the pitfalls of people pleasing, negative backchat and crippling comparison along the way. It's a carefully curated toolkit of tried and tested mechanisms and small pearls of wisdom to start combatting that feeling that holds us back from speaking up, from following our dreams or even feeling that our dreams aren't good or big enough. I hope it will provide you with a comforting hug and pep talk, from one insecure girl to another.

Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own... When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwell's marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WWII in London.

In this fully revised anniversary edition of the classic testament to women's empowerment, Muscio explores with candidness and humor such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women. Sending out a call for every woman to be the "Cuntlovin' Ruler of Her Sexual Universe", Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing the provocative and celebrating womanhood.

In this of-the-moment essay collection, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner explores the ways in which Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan became bona fide global superstars while revolutionizing ’90s music. In an era when male-fronted musical acts dominated radio and were given serious critical consideration, these four women were reduced, mocked, and disparaged by the media and became pop culture jokes, even as their albums were topping the charts and demolishing sales records.

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of 10 previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada's Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don't fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.

Is it true that gays are born that way and cannot change? Having grown up gay and redirected his life, Tom knows it is not. His story defines clearly and convincingly how others can chart their new course as well. Written from personal, academic, secular, and spiritual perspectives, this audiobook is a message of hope. It describes ways in which those homosexuals who wish to do so can realize a new way of being, moving way beyond gay. It clarifies how a homosexual identity can evolve and the real motive behind the sexual desires.

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation.

In The Pleasure Gap, Katherine Rowland rejects the idea that women should settle for diminished pleasure; instead, she argues women should take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the workplace and understand its causes and effects. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with more than 100 women and dozens of sexual health professionals, Rowland shows that the pleasure gap is neither medical malady nor psychological condition but rather a result of our culture's troubled relationship with women's sexual expression.

Emotional labor is essential to our society and economy, but it’s so often invisible. In this groundbreaking, journalistic deep dive, Rose Hackman shares the stories of hundreds of women, tracing the history of this kind of work and exposing common manifestations of the phenomenon. But Hackman doesn’t simply diagnose a problem—she empowers us to combat this insidious force and forge pathways for radical evolution, justice, and change.

The story of one woman's struggle to care for her seriously ill husband - and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.

A self-help audiobook for single, financially savvy women; It outlines how to dress, present yourself, what subjects to get educated in, and what type of places to visit in order to meet and attract wealthy men. It not only gives pointers on how to get financial favors from your suitors without giving it up but it also gives pointers on how to make the money you accumulated work for you in the future. The author shares the lessons she's learned over the years and inspires women around the globe to never lose sight of their goals.

For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other "for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health" for periods of 30 or 40 - sometimes as many as 50 - years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife. In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.

Why do some women still expect men to buy their dinner? Why do some men feel depressed after masturbating? What the hell is going on with porn? Comedian Sara Pascoe explores the complex connections between sex, power and money. This audiobook is a thoughtful and entertaining journey through anatomy and arousal, dating and sex work, animals and technology, and Pascoe makes our most baffling human behaviours less mysterious.

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.

Take a spiritual pilgrimage into the rich, fertile soil of the divine feminine. For centuries, a hidden current has run through the world's wisdom traditions, a dark, positive, feminine energy represented by such striking symbols as the Tibetan Buddhist Tara, the Catholic Black Madonna, and the Hindu Kali. Now award-winning author and researcher China Galland takes you around the world to encounter the most powerful manifestations of "fierce compassion."

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years - using a Black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on Black women's - especially poor Black women's - control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.

A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, JELL-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love, and loss. In crystalline prose, Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.