The essays in this volume develop an understanding of the institutions, practices and forms of representation of Indian sexual relations and their boundaries of legitimacy.

"This anthology makes it abundantly clear that feminist film criticism is flourishing and has developed dramatically since its inception in the early 1970s." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Erens brings together a wide variety of writings and methodologies by U.S. and British feminist film scholars. The twenty-seven essays represent some of the most influential work on Hollywood film, women's cinema, and documentary filmmaking to appear during the past decade and beyond. Contributors include Lucie Arbuthnot, Linda Artel, Pam Cook, Teresa de Lauretis, Mary Ann Doane, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Mary C. Gentile, Bette Gordon, Florence Jacobowitz, Claire Johnston, E. Ann Kaplan, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Sonya Michel, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Gail Seneca, Kaja Silverman, Lori Spring, Jackie Stacey, Maureen Turim, Diane Waldman, Susan Wengraf, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.

Chiefly on the partition of Punjab, 1947.

A personal and cultural exploration of silence and its value in our lives—“[an] artful book, mixing autobiography, travel writing, meditation, and essay” (Independent, UK). In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country and, to her surprise, falling in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent, and beautifully written book, Maitland describes how she began to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. Maitland also delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression. Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway. “Her book is probably unique in its subject, and timely, because good, healing silence is becoming hard to find, and we may not know we need it” (Guardian, UK).

From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.

The Eloquence of Silence, first published in 1994, is considered a seminal text in the scholarship of women and North Africa. Marnia Lazreg makes a critical departure from more traditional studies of Algerian women, which usually examine female roles in relation to Islam – and instead takes an interdisciplinary approach, arguing that Algerian women's roles are shaped by a variety of structural and symbolic factors. These include colonial domination, demographic change, nationalism, family formation, the turn to culturalism, and the progressive shift to a capitalist economy. Grounded in archival research supplemented by interviews, and adopting a historico-critical method, the book identifies and examines the significance of an enduring feature of women’s journey: their instrumental use as tropes in struggles between groups of men opposed to one another during political crises. It demonstrates that despite being central to contentious political issues, women’s needs and aspirations were obscured just as their voices have traditionally been silenced. This new edition is thoroughly updated throughout to connect the original material to major political disruptions in the twenty-first century, such as the 9/11 attacks on New York and events around the "Arab Spring." The book foregrounds women’s determination to forge ahead, as well as their activism, which led to progress in fighting rape and other forms of violence made banal in the wake of the civil war (1992–2002). It also calls for a "decolonization" of concepts and theoretical systems used in accounting for women’s lived reality, and a questioning of facile postfeminist discourses in their manifold expressions.

'A beautifully written, intellectually challenging, and highly readable exploration of the mysteries of contemporary mass media and popular culture. Real does a masterful job of empowering his readers. Students will find this book fascinating, and in some cases terrifying' - Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco State University