Everyday Women's and Gender Studies

by Ann Braithwaite, Catherine Orr

Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies is a text-reader that offers instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women’s and gender studies. This book highlights major concepts that organize the diverse work in this Knowledges, Identities, Equalities, Bodies, Places, and Representations. Its focus on "the everyday" speaks to the importance this book places on students understanding the taken-for granted circumstances of their daily lives. Precisely because it is not the same for everyone, the everyday becomes the ideal location for cultivating students’ intellectual capacities as well as their political investigations and interventions. In addition to exploring each concept in detail, each chapter includes up to five short recently published readings that illuminate an aspect of that concept. Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies explores the idea that "People are different, and the world isn’t fair," and engages students in the inevitably complicated follow-up question, "Now that we know, how shall we live?"

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2015

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. Obviously this was a textbook for a class. I'm probably going to sound like an old geezer complaining about how things have changed from what they were like back in MY day, but geeze louize. Put a damn glossary in your textbook, especially when your subject is pure postmodernism and you deliberately go out of your way to use terms in ways no one has used them for the last thousand years of the history of your language. The index sucks. Calling your works cited a "Chapter Genealogies" and acknowledging that it's not even complete is so twee I want to find your hipster typewriters so I can puke on them. Every bleeding chapter begins with an "imagine yourself in this situation" example that no one over the age of 20 has experienced in 20 years. Imagine yourself at a frat party. Imagine yourself going home for Thanksgiving or Spring break. Imagine yourself writing something better than this unimaginative drivel. Some of the included readings are engaging and illustrate the concepts and some of them... "These questions remain as I continue to investigate the simultaneity of reclamation and reinscription that affect communities in such disparate ways. The seemingly celebratory power of language for one marginalized group impedes on the material reality for another and yet there are those who are multiply marginalized who traverse more than one group at a time. The work of unpacking language that does not easily fit along the binary of positive and negative must propel our thinking into nonlinear dimensions. We must embrace the challenge of multi-dimensional complexity and uncover new models that can accommodate the contradictions of our language" (That's from "The Illest" by Moya Bailey, a reading included in the chapter on knowledges.) The work of unpacking language, indeed.

[Karime · Rating 5 out of 5]

This thorough book is composed not just of theory of women's and gender studies but it is also backed by several essays by other people's experiences or research on various subjects, oppression systems and their intersectionalities with gender, race, sex orientation, age, nationality, etc. Needless to say, in order to truly appreciate this book for what it is you truly have to read each and every one of them, yet I think that despite its lengthiness, it is still barely scratching the surface and gets you started on your own path down gender studies.

[Olivia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was ass and had crazy ass takes too. Feminism is not rooted in sex work and sex work is not a non-heteronormative way of practicing safe sex or empowerment!!!! Terrible take on an oppresive service that does not give true consent to the women who risk their lives doing sex work in order to survive. I mean, yes, some of it was good but seriously I don't really care about the various essays about fat people when I came to learn about feminism. Bruh idgaf, there wasn't even any connection made between fat-phobia and women's studies. Reading it was not revolutionary as so many other revolutionary black feminists have been saying this stuff for years (and in a much better way that doesn't jack itself off) don't waste your time on such jargon

[Eli Barnet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the text book for women gender and sexuality studies at ubco

[Elizabeth Vilchis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a required text for a college class. It was okay, but a little hard to read. It provided great insight into issues normally excluded from syllabi.

[Addicted_to_Love · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional!