Addresses the conflict, contradictions and ambiguities that are often encountered in field research.

How are sex and gender related? Are they the same thing? What exactly is gender? How many genders are there? What is the science on all of this? Is gender a product of nature, nurture, or both? This book introduces readers to fundamental questions about sex and gender categories as they’ve been considered across the centuries and through a wide array of disciplines and perspectives. From the Bible to Darwin, from Enlightenment thinkers to contemporary trans philosophers, Beyond the Binary comprises an accessible survey of the wide range of views about sex and gender. This revised and expanded edition uses updated terminology and diagnostic criteria and offers new material with a greater focus on trans, Indigenous, racialized, and subaltern thinkers. It includes useful discussion questions and further reading recommendations at the end of each chapter, as well as an extensive glossary of terms.

The author identifies a number of male figures with 'cool masculinity', including Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee and Brian de Palma.

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her hand-written diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity.

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NATALIE HAYNES When this book was first published in 1949 it was to outrage and scandal. Never before had the case for female liberty been so forcefully and successfully argued. De Beauvoir’s belief that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and began a fight for greater equality and economic independence. These pages contain the key passages of the book that changed perceptions of women forever. TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE BORDE AND SHEILA MALOVANY-CHEVALLIER ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTINE REID

Not the Second Sex is about some of the women I had met around the world in the last thirty years. These women had instilled a firm belief in me that women are in fact not the second sex and that a man appears to be superior only because they allow him to be so. Laila “All that investment is only for removing the dress and become naked at the end of the day in front of a man,” Krishna said to Laila, a gorgeous fashion model in Mumbai, when she was bolstering about the efforts she had to take to dress and make up. Annie “Given a choice, a woman will always choose a man with whom she would be happy rather than comfortable. A man never understands that.” Rachel “Author Rebecca West said, ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” Maitreyi Maitreyi asked Yajnavalkya her husband, the great intellect and renowned sage, “If you leave me with all your wealth to seek the Brahman, what shall I do with that by which I cannot become an immortal?.”

Acknowledged by many feminists as the single most important theoretical work of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) nevertheless occupies an anomalous place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an undeniable impact, not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century western thinking about the concept of 'woman' in general.This collection of six new essays by scholars from the disciplines of French, English literature, history, cultural criticism, feminist theory and philosophy makes a valuable contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously influential text for a new generation of feminist readers, and also for cultural theorists, for whom the question of 'the feminine' is at the centre of key debates in philosophy and postmodernity.The contributors provide a significantly new rethinking of the place of The Second Sex in cultural history and of women and representation, the role of 'fictions' and the problem of ethical agency in the work of the leading intellectual woman of this age.

Extensive social science research, particularly by anthropologists, has explored women’s reproductive lives, their use of reproductive technologies, and their experiences as mothers and nurturers of children. Meanwhile, few if any volumes have explored men’s reproductive concerns or contributions to women’s reproductive health: Men are clearly viewed as the “second sex” in reproduction. This volume argues that the marginalization of men is an oversight of considerable proportions. It sheds new light on male reproduction from a cross-cultural, global perspective, focusing not only upon men in Europe and America but also those in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Both heterosexual and homosexual, married and unmarried men are featured in this volume, which assesses concerns ranging from masculinity and sexuality to childbirth and fatherhood.

Although Kierkegaad provided many a puzzle for his biographers, one would be wrong to assume Kierkegaard invariably lied when he claimed to be telling the truth. Tying Kierkegaard's baffling misogyny, and ultimately his misogamy, to the existence of an inner mysterium, The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex navigates between the Charybdis of an allegedly insurmountable gulf between works and biography and the Scylla of the biographical fallacy, a peril whose threat raised greater alarms in Kierkegaard. Celine Leon draws her conclusions by paying close attention to the texts and by carefully distinguishing between author and pseudonyms. She only brings works and life together when Kierkegaard ambivalently plays with the former in order to impart something of the secret lying at the core of his being, to reverse Sartre's famous formulation, to communicate at the heart of hiddenness. Leon shows how Kierkegaard-a writer whose views on other subjects she holds in high regard-projected his lack onto a particular woman, Regina Olsen, his one time fiancee and lifelong obsession, then onto all women, and ultimately, regarding his own exceptional status as normative, elected to ban the heterosexual relation altogether. This is not, however, the same as saying that-notwithstanding the religious development and the enormous production whose twin onset he ascribed to the rupture with Regina-Kierkegaard did not do so at an egregious personal cost. Book jacket.

This volume is a study of women in French cinema from 1981 which includes material on stars, directors and producers. Each chapter includes an analysis of five or six films, and a concluding chapter examines the value and place of women in the French film industry.