'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms. Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

This collection presents fresh evidence and new perspectives on the diverse ways in which women created and interacted with cultures of song between c. 600 and c. 1500.

Based on close readings of both public and private documents – court records, churchwarden accounts, depositions, diaries, letters and pamphlets – this collection of essays presents the largely untold story of non-elite women and their dealings with the law.

A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.

Theology can become quite futile if it does not emerge from the day-to-day lives of the people. Theology, on its part, has to be answerable to the church and society and fulfill its noble mission of contributing towards the transformation of the present order of the church and society. This book ultimately has this aim. By identifying the ideological underpinnings that emerge from the perceptions of women, this book indicates possible future directions in the area of theology. The uniqueness of this book lies in its contextual focus and the day-to-day lived experiences of women with their bodies. It is the first of its kind in making a scientific study on the socio-cultural perceptions of women with regard to their bodies in the context of India. The special contribution of this book is in bringing to the fore the elements of agency which women exercise in their everyday lives in spite of their oppressive situations. The unconventional women of this book become possible role models for women who are voiceless, helpless, and victimized to grow in assertion and affirmation of their bodies and identities. This book will facilitate women to deconstruct the age-old oppressive perceptions and construct their identity as women in relation to their bodies and to take hold of their bodies amidst dehumanization. The book will also facilitate a critical look at the present understanding of body in Christian theology and provide future directions for the reformulation of the Theology of Body and Sexuality.

Theology can become quite futile if it does not emerge from the day-to-day lives of the people. Theology, on its part, has to be answerable to the church and society and fulfill its noble mission of contributing towards the transformation of the present order of the church and society. This book ultimately has this aim. By identifying the ideological underpinnings that emerge from the perceptions of women, this book indicates possible future directions in the area of theology. The uniqueness of this book lies in its contextual focus and the day-to-day lived experiences of women with their bodies. It is the first of its kind in making a scientific study on the socio-cultural perceptions of women with regard to their bodies in the context of India. The special contribution of this book is in bringing to the fore the elements of agency which women exercise in their everyday lives in spite of their oppressive situations. The unconventional women of this book become possible role models for women who are voiceless, helpless, and victimized to grow in assertion and affirmation of their bodies and identities. This book will facilitate women to deconstruct the age-old oppressive perceptions and construct their identity as women in relation to their bodies and to take hold of their bodies amidst dehumanization. The book will also facilitate a critical look at the present understanding of body in Christian theology and provide future directions for the reformulation of the Theology of Body and Sexuality.

Illustrates the rich relationship between film history and feminist theory. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History brings together a diverse group of international feminist scholars to examine the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. Editor Vicki Callahan has assembled essays that reflect a range of methodological approaches--including archival work, visual culture, reception studies, biography, ethno-historical studies, historiography, and textual analysis--by a diverse group of film and media studies scholars to prove that feminist theory, film history, and social practice are inevitably and productively intertwined. Essays in Reclaiming the Archive investigate the different models available in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention. Chapters have an international focus and range chronologically from early cinema to post-feminist texts, organized around the key areas of reception, stars, and authorship. A final section examines the very definitions of feminism (post-feminism), cinema (transmedia), and archives (virtual and online) in place today. The essays in Reclaiming the Archive prove that a significant heritage of film studies lies in the study of feminism in film and feminist film theory. Scholars of film history and feminist studies will appreciate the breadth of work in this volume.

This book addresses the fraught relationship between women and aggression, one troubled by age-old patriarchal forces that disparage women’s ambition, assertion, and voice. Told from a psychoanalytic perspective, the book details the sociocultural forces that infect a woman’s intrapsychic dynamics and compel her to sacrifice her goals and dreams. Compelling examples are offered from current politics, the author’s own struggles with aggression, and clinical work with female patients who successfully reclaimed their aggression. The book addresses the critical question of how a woman can ever succeed, through the presentation of the author’s detailed and psychoanalytically informed interviews with six powerful and highly influential women. Each woman brings to life the story of her history, influences, and challenges to provide inspiration for others to reimagine their own “nastiness,” as an innovative, vitalizing tool. This book is distinguished by its unique blend of contemporary life, psychoanalytic practice, feminist theory and gender studies, untold in any other forum or publication. It is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those interested in working with women in a therapeutic setting and understanding their challenges with aggression.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.