One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Essays discuss the relations among gender, self, and society, the significance of women's mothering for gender personality and gender relations, and how the psychodynamics of gender create and sustain individualism.

An ambitious and highly engaging history of ideas, Feminism and Its Discontents brings together far-flung intellectual tendencies rarely seen in intimate ...

In 1965, when psychologists Sandra and Daryl Bem met and married, they were determined to function as truly egalitarian partners and to raise their children in accordance with gender-liberated, anti-homophobic, and sex-positive feminist ideals. This book by Sandra Bem, an autobiographical account of the Bems' nearly thirty-year marriage, is both a personal history of the Bems' past and a social history of a key period in feminism's past. It is also a look into feminism's future, because the Bems' children, Emily (...) and Jeremy, now in their early twenties, speak in the book as well. (shrink)