This is the first comprehensive reader that brings African experiences to bear on the ongoing global discussions of women, gender, and society. Bringing together the essential writing on this topic from the last 25 years, these essays discuss gender in Africa from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
When we gathered people together for two invitational conferences on “Revisiting the ‘North American Berdache’ Empirically and Theoretically,” our aim was to create a dialogue between indigenous/Native people and aca- demicswho had written about them. The conferences,funded by the Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, provided the start of collab orative work that took place…
The frequent appearance of androgyny in Ming and Qing literature has long interested scholars of late imperial Chinese culture. A flourishing economy, widespread education, rising individualism, a prevailing hedonism–all of these had contributed to the gradual disintegration of traditional gender roles in late Ming and early Qing China (1550-1750) and given rise to the phenomenon…
Androgyny in Modern Literature engages with the ways in which the trope of androgyny has shifted during the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Alchemical, Platonic, sexological, psychological, and decadent representations of androgyny have provided writers with an icon which has been appropriated in diverse, often paradoxical, ways. Androgyny and the androgyne have signaled cultural regeneration and…
After decades of steady progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, several parts of Europe are facing new waves of resistance to a so-called ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’. Opposition to progressive gender equality is manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies…
Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places…
This paper will discuss the gendering of the critical divide between oral and literary culture in relation to two Mozambican short stories: ‘Maria Pedra no cruzar dos caminhos’ published in Mia Couto’s 2004 collection O Fio das Missangas and Paulina Chiziane’s ‘As Cicatrizes do Amor’ published in the 1994 anthology O Conto Moçam- bicano. Da…
Nicola Ókin Frioli’s series of portraits entitled ‘We are Princesses in a Land of Machos’ (2004) represents the muxes of Juchitán, who occupy the non-binary gender position identifying as neither men nor women. Through analysing these images, this paper explains how still photography represents and contains alternative understandings and expressions of gender. Ókin Frioli’s photographs…
A richly evocative collection of photographs by internationally renowned photographer Kike Arnal, Bordered Lives seeks to push back against the transphobic caricatures that have perpetuated discrimination against the transgender community in Mexico. Despite some important advances in recognizing and protecting the rights of its transgender community, including legislation against hate crimes targeting transgender people, discrimination…
Feminism is Queer is an introduction to the intimately related disciplines of gender and queer theory. While guiding the reader through complex theory, the author develops the original position of “queer feminism,” which presents queer theory as continuous with feminist theory. While there have been significant conceptual tensions between second wave feminism and traditional lesbian…