front cover of This Book Is an Action
This Book Is an Action
Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics
Edited by Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr
University of Illinois Press, 2016
The Women's Liberation Movement held a foundational belief in the written word's power to incite social change. In this new collection, Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr curate essays that reveal how second-wave feminists embraced this potential with a vengeance. The authors in This Book Is an Action investigate the dynamic print culture that emerged as the feminist movement reawakened in the late 1960s. The works created by women shined a light on taboo topics and offered inspiring accounts of personal transformation. Yet, as the essayists reveal, the texts represented something far greater: a distinct and influential American literary renaissance. On the one hand, feminists took control of the process by building a network of publishers and distributors owned and operated by women. On the other, women writers threw off convention to venture into radical and experimental forms, poetry, and genre storytelling, and in so doing created works that raised the consciousness of a generation. Examining feminist print culture from its structures and systems to defining texts by Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker, This Book Is an Action suggests untapped possibilities for the critical and aesthetic analysis of the diverse range of literary production during feminism's second wave.
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front cover of Women's Studies for the Future
Women's Studies for the Future
Foundations, Interrogations, Politics
Edited by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins
Rutgers University Press, 2005

Established as an academic field in the 1970s, women’s studies is a relatively young but rapidly growing area of study. Not only has the number of scholars working in this subject expanded exponentially, but women’s studies has become institutionalized, offering graduate degrees and taking on departmental status in many colleges and universities. At the same time, this field—formed in the wake of the feminist movement—is finding itself in a precarious position in what is now often called a “post-feminist” society. This raises challenging issues for faculty, students, and administrators. How must the field adjust its goals and methods to continue to affect change in the future?

Bringing together essays by newcomers as well as veterans to the field, this essential volume addresses timely questions including:

  • Without a unitary understanding of the subject, woman, what is the focus of women’s studies?
  • How can women’s studies fulfill the promise of interdisciplinarity?
  •  What is the continuing place of activism in women’s studies?
  •  What are the best ways to think about, teach, and act upon the intersections of race, class, gender, disability, nation, and sexuality?

Offering innovative models for research and teaching and compelling new directions for action, Women’s Studies for the Future ensures the continued relevance and influence of this developing field.

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