Despite decades of activism, resistance, and education, both feminists and gender rebels continue to experience personal, political, institutional, and cultural resistance to rights, recognition, and respect. In the face of these inequalities and disparities, Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse seeks to engage with, and disrupt the long-standing debates, unquestioned conceptual formations, and taboo topics in contemporary feminist studies. The first half of the book challenges key concepts and theories related to feminist scholarship by advocating new approaches for theorizing interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, critical race theory, trans studies, and genetics. The second half of the book offers feminist critiques or explorations of timely topics such as the 2017 Women’s March and Donald Trump’s election as well as non-Western perspectives of family and the absence of women’s perspectives in healthcare. Contributors comprise of leading scholars and activists from disciplines including gender and sexuality studies, African American studies, communication studies, sociology, political science, and media. Transgressing Feminist Theory and Discourse is a compelling examination of some of the most high-profile feminist issues today. It hopes to infuse future and current debates and conversations around feminism and feminist theory with intersectional, imaginative, provocative, and evocative ideas, inspiring bold cross-fertilizations of concepts, principles, and practices.

Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice draws from contemporary, concrete atrocities against women and marginalized communities to re-conceptualize moral shame and to set moral shame apart from dimensions of subordination, humiliation, and disgrace. The interdisciplinary collection starts with a contribution from a Yazidi-survivor of genocidal and sexual violence, whose case brings together core themes: gender, ethnic and religious identity, and violence and shame. Further accounts of shame and gendered violence in this collection take the reader to other and equally disturbing accounts of lesser-known atrocities from around the world. Although shame is sometimes posited as an inevitable companion to human life, editors Lenart Škof and Shé M. Hawke situate the discussion in the theoretical landscape of shame, and the contributors challenge this concept through fields as diverse as law, journalism, activism, philosophy, theology, ecofeminism, and gender and cultural studies. Their discussion of gendered shame makes room for it to be both a negative and a redemptive concept. Combining junior and senior scholarship, this collection examines power relations in the cycle of shame and violence.

Crucial conversations about feminist theories and how they can fall apart, rupture, and fragment.

Women’s Movement critically explores the transgressive potential of feminist escape narratives and argues that they are, almost by definition, radically different from paradigmatic male escape narratives. While definitions of escape are necessarily broad, they have too often excluded the ambiguous escape – the escape most closely associated with the female. Indeed, feminist escape narratives often resist a happy ending, and Women’s Movement argues that these narrative closures reflect the changing face of feminism, as it sheds its old certainties, is faced with a monumental “backlash” and is refigured as the potentially less threatening “postfeminism”. Resisting the automatic association of “escape” with “escapist,” Women’s Movement analyzes male adventure and quest narratives, including Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Blood Meridian, and Deliverance, before turning to a range of feminist texts. While being the first book to give critical attention to some postfeminist novels, Women’s Movement more often acts as a channel for offering different ways of approaching familiar feminist texts, including, among others, Marian Engel’s Bear, Atwood’s Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale, Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground and Dancing in the Dark, Anne Tyler’s Earthly Possessions and Ladder of Years, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.

The goal of this research is to closely examine the rhetoric of landmark feminist writers from three distinct, historical movements that culminate in the divide between Western Feminism and a global movement that allows for the unity of women from any race, culture, or social class. The works criticized in this analysis come from First Wave feminism's foundational writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woof [i.e. Woolf] ; Second Wave feminist writers Gloria Steinem, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, and from Third Wave feminism as a cyber-discourse, with attention to Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner and Ariel Levy. The lens I view these works through comes from landmark French feminists Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, providing a theory of existentialism, linguistic construction and thus, social construction to describes the box in which the writers of each feminist wave function. By deconstructing each of the rhetorical works using the lens of the French feminists, my goal is to recognize and deconstruct the foundations of Wollstonecraft and Woolfe [i.e. Woolf] as inherently male and thus, proscribing an essentialism to women that does not speak for women of other races, cultures or social classes but in fact, exoticizes these women as "other."

Incorporating autobiography as well as reflections on relations between mothers and daughters, psychoanalysis, feminist theorizing, race, and modernist political theories and philosophies, renowned feminist theorist Jane Flax brings together eight of her most recent essays in Disputed Subjects. ‘Indisputably required reading ... Lively, sophisticated, and challenging discussions at the crucial intersection of feminist, psychoanalytic, and political ideas. Jane Flax allows her own multiple and conflicting identities into open dialogue, and the result is a promontory on the postmodern landscape.’ – Kenneth J. Gergen ‘Jane Flax is one of the most challenging women writing today ... It is the well-informed voice of sanity, balance and courage.’ – Phyllis Grosskurth ‘Jane Flax’s bold new book challenges orthodoxies in feminism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. By questioning the questions that have been taken to define these fields, she demonstrates once again the originality of her thinking.’ – Alison M. Jaggar