Judith Lorber

Degendering and Feminist Change (Contemporary Societies)

Breaking the Bowls

Lisa Jean Moore

Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore consider the interface between the social institutions of gender and Western medicine in this brief, lively textbook. They offer a distinct feminist viewpoint to analyze issues of power and politics concerning physical illness. For a creative, feminist-oriented alternative to traditional texts on medical sociology, medical anthropology, and the history of medicine, this is an ideal choice.

Gender and the Social Construction of Illness

Myra Marx Ferree

Beth B. Hess

This comprehensive handbook summarizes the state of gender studies, by examining the crucial research of the past decade and by encouraging thinking about how the questions central to studying gender have themselves changed. The book is an important step towards constructing a new analytical framework approach for the social sciences, one that calls into question disciplinary boundaries. The contributors illustrate how the use of gender by scholars in various and overlapping fields of study has helped alter concepts and research designs

Revisioning Gender

For centuries the biological sciences have dissected, measured, and probed the human body as a product of nature. But from a feminist perspective, the human body is a social production. Human bodies are shaped and controlled by the norms and expectations of gendered social orders, intersected by racial, class, religious, and age norms and expectations. The result is a gendered body produced for a gendered social world. In this concise text with readings, designed for undergraduate students, Lorber and Moore present feminist contributions to social and cultural studies of the human body, showing the construction of gendered bodies in different contexts. The authors argue that the ideology of the perfect body is a powerful means of social control for girls and boys as well as women and men. The authors show how children's bodies are gendered through games and sports - and shaped and modified throughout adulthood to meet social expectations. Each chapter includes a list of key concepts, three readings, recommended books and articles, and Internet sources. For the instructor, the book includes class exercises and a list of films with somatic themes.

Feminist Perspectives

Gendered Bodies

Susan A. Farrell

The Social Construction of Gender

In Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, Fifth Edition, internationally renowned feminist Judith Lorber examines various evolving theories of gender inequality. Tightly structured around Lorber's own paradigm of "reform, resistance, rebellion," this combination text/reader acknowledges feminism's significant contributions to redressing gender inequality and celebrates its enormous accomplishments over the last forty years. It also documents feminism's ongoing political activism, and, with an awareness of postmodern and third-wave trends, points toward its future. The fifth edition features eight new readings and five significantly rewritten, reorganized, and updated chapters, including one on transnational feminism, which encompasses Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Other rewritten chapters are Psychoanalytic and Cultural Feminism, Social Construction Feminism, Postmodern Feminism and Queer Theory, and Third Wave Feminism. As before, the bulleted lists introducing each type of feminism include the feminism's theories of the sources of gender inequality, its politics, its contributions, and a critique. An accessible, engaging classic written by one of sociology's first feminists, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, Fifth Edition, is an ideal undergraduate and graduate text for courses in introductory feminism, feminist theory, and women's studies.

Feminist Theories and Politics

Gender Inequality

Mit den Gender-Paradoxien erscheint das wichtigste Buch der in New York lebenden Feministin und Soziologin Judith Lorber in deutscher Sprache. Auf der Grundlage eines sozial-konstruktivistischen Ansatzes zeigt Lorber, wie die Unterschiede zwischen Frauen und Männern ebenso wie die Unterschiede zwischen Hetero- und Homosexuellen in der sozialen Praxis hergestellt und institutionalisiert werden. Dabei wird Gender als soziale Basis-Institution konzeptualisiert, die - vergleichbar den Institutionen Familie, Ökonomie und Religion - das soziale Leben in allen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen grundlegend strukturiert und prägt. Darüber hinaus nimmt Judith Lorber eine kategoriale Differenzierung zwischen Sex, Sexualität und Gender vor. Jede dieser Kategorien ist sozial konstruiert, und jede entzieht sich bei genauerer Betrachtung einer binären Ordnung.Zielsetzung des Buches ist ein Beitrag zur Beseitigung der Ungleichheiten zwischen Männern und Frauen. "Wenn die gender-Ungleichheit abgeschafft werden soll, müssen die gender entweder in jeder Hinsicht völlig gleichgestellt werden oder gender darf nicht länger eine zentrale soziale Kategorie sein, die bestimmt, welcher soziale Status einem Menschen zugewiesen wird."

Gender-Paradoxien

Gendered Bodies, Second Edition, focuses on key themes that reveal how gendered relations, ideologies, and practices shape human bodies. At the same time, it shows how human bodies are linked to other significant axes of inequality based on racial ethnic group, disability, sexuality, class, culture, religion, age, and nation. Thoroughly updated throughout, the second edition incorporates sixteen new selections - including non-Western perspectives - on such fascinating topics as evolution and motherhood; breastfeeding; breast cancer; the effects of height on men; job discrimination and transgendered people; world champion runner Caster Semenya and sex verification; disability, gender, and embodiment; and Palestinian female suicide bombers. It also adds new references and a concluding chapter, "Social Bodies in an Interconnected World."--Pub. desc.

Mary Evans

Kathy Davis

"This breathtakingly broad, interdisciplinary reader demonstrates how widely feminist thinking has spread, how deeply it has shaken settled assumptions in the disciplines and how much new light it throws on contemporary controversies." - Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin-Madison "A timely intervention and highly engaged, thoughtful and scholarly analysis of the state of gender and women's studies in the West by three eminent feminist scholars... Highly cognisant of the central issues that have fractured, blocked and enhanced western feminism." - Bev Skeggs, Goldsmiths "The comprehensiveness and the interdisciplinary range of themes are impressive, and they make the Handbook into a wonderful tool for teachers and students of women's and gender studies." - Nina Lykke, Linkoeping University Gender and women's studies is one of the most challenging fields within the social sciences - the dynamics of gender relations and the social and cultural implications of gender constructions offer a lively forum of debate. The Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies presents a comprehensive and engaging review of the most recent developments within the field, including the study of masculinity, the feminist implications of postmodernism, the 'cultural turn' and globalization. The authors review current research and offer critical analyses of women's and gender studies in work, the welfare state, family, education, religion, violence and war and feminist global politics. Edited by three leading academics from Europe and the United States, and with 25 chapters written by scholars based throughout the world, the Handbook situates the most important debates in the field within a uniquely international and interdisciplinary context. The Handbook is a useful introduction to gender theory and an exciting starting-point for fresh debates.

Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies

In this pathbreaking book, a well-known feminist and sociologist--who is also the Founding Editor of Gender & Society--challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber views gender as wholly a product of socialization subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation. In her new paradigm, gender is an institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Drawing on many schools of feminist scholarship and on research from anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, Lorber explores different paradoxes of gender: --why we speak of only two "opposite sexes" when there is such a variety of sexual behaviors and relationships; --why transvestites, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites do not affect the conceptualization of two genders and two sexes in Western societies; --why most of our cultural images of women are the way men see them and not the way women see themselves; --why all women in modern society are expected to have children and be the primary caretaker; --why domestic work is almost always the sole responsibility of wives, even when they earn more than half the family income; --why there are so few women in positions of authority, when women can be found in substantial numbers in many occupations and professions; --why women have not benefited from major social revolutions. Lorber argues that the whole point of the gender system today is to maintain structured gender inequality--to produce a subordinate class (women) that can be exploited as workers, sexual partners, childbearers, and emotional nurturers. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize economic, educational, and cultural resources or the positions of power.

Judith Lorber

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