BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW:
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives
edited by Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, 2011, 304 pp. This book conceptualizes
and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading
anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of
communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and
men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia,
and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and
reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control, HIV/AIDS, assisted
reproductive technologies, paternity tests, sex work, and humanitarian assistance. The
contributors address the methodological challenges of research on globalization, including ways
of combining fine-grained ethnography with analyses of large-scale political, economic, and
ideological forces. Their essays reveal complex interactions among global and state population
policies and politics; public health, human rights, and feminist movements; diverse medical
systems; various religious practices, doctrines, and institutions; and intimate relationships and
individual aspirations.
Transforming Scholarship: Why Women's and Gender Studies Students Are Changing
Themselves and the World, by Michele Tracy Berger and Cheryl Radeloff; 2011, 278 pp. This
book is a user friendly guide of practical guidance and inspiration for supporting a student's
interest in a Women's Studies degree. It focuses on three of the major barriers students face when
exploring Women's Studies. The first is a lack of awareness that Women's Studies constitutes an
academic field. The second barrier is the negative response a student often faces when
announcing to the world that he or she is interested in Women’s Studies. The third barrier
regards the perceived lack of employment and career options of graduating with a Women's
Studies degree. This book will support students to think critically about what they know, how to
demonstrate what they know, and how to prepare for life both personally and professionally after
the degree.
Women Fielding Danger: Negotiating Ethnographic Identities in Field Research, edited by
Martha K. Huggins and Marie-Louise Glebbeek; 2009, 408 pp. This volume shows how identity
performances can facilitate or block field research outcomes. Focusing on ethnographic research
across a wide range of disciplines and world regions, this deeply informed book presents
practical “to-dos” and technical research strategies. In addition, it offers unique illustrations of
how the political, geographic, and organizational realities of field sites shape identity
negotiations and research outcomes.
The Gender Question in Globalization: Changing Perspectives and Practices,
by Tine Davids and Francien van Driel, eds.; 2008, (hardcover) 246 pp. Orthodox views of
globalization assume that it has the same features and impact everywhere, i.e. the feminization of
poverty, labour and even peace. As these ideas circulate in official documents and scientific
writings, they settle practically as truths. This challenging and unique book is amongst the first to
deconstruct these orthodoxies, using a multi-layered gender analysis where globalization is not
treated as a linear and top-down process with a known outcome and a pre-conceived definition of
gender. Instead, the authors scrutinize the dynamics of each context on its own merits, including
the agency of women and men, resulting in unexpected and groundbreaking insights into the
variety of differences apparent, even in sometimes seemingly similar global processes. Through
this gender lens, different and new meanings of gender appear, rooted in multiple modernities.
The book will be a seminal contribution to debates in the fields of international labor, sexuality,
identity, feminism, peace studies and migration.
Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa: Exploring Dislocation and Agency, by Elinami
Veraeli Swai; 2010, (hardcover) 220 pp. This book breaks new ground in understanding how
modern society has shaped women’s knowledge system in Africa and deconstructs long-held
myths about the position of ordinary women in the construction of knowledge. Using case
studies, it historicizes the experiences of ordinary women in Tanzania and looks at how
empowerment is used to, paradoxically, eviscerate women’s knowledge systems.
Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political
Activism, and Culture, edited by Kia Lilly Caldwell et al; 2009, (hardcover) 223pp. This wideranging anthology examines the gendered dimensions of citizenship experiences and uses them
as a point of departure for rethinking contemporary practices of social inclusion and belonging.
Drawing on ethnographic research with diverse communities in the Caribbean, Europe, Latin
America, and the United States, contributors argue for the importance of understanding how
notions of belonging and entitlement are locally experienced and subjectively defined by
members of marginalized communities. Through analysis of intersectional racial/ethnic, gender,
class, and national/tribal identities, the essays place the experiences and analyses of women of
color and Third World women at the very center of our understanding of citizenship.
The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights, by Irene Khan; 2009, (paperback) 250pp. The
author of this book argues that fighting poverty is about fighting deprivation, exclusion,
insecurity and powerlessness. She asserts that while people living in poverty lack material
resources, more than that, they lack control over their own lives. To tackle global poverty, we
need to focus on the human rights abuses that drive poverty and keep people poor. Giving people
a say in their own future and demanding that they be treated with dignity and respect for their
rights is the way to make progress. Through personal reflection and case-studies, Khan shows
why poverty is first and foremost not a problem of economics but of human rights
Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J.
Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry; 2010, (paperback) 248 pp. The contributors of Contesting
Archives challenge the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, and a historical
repository of information. Instead, these historians view it as a place where decisions are made
about whose documents--and therefore whose history--is important. Finding that women's voices
and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether, they have developed many new
methodologies for creating unique archives and uncovering more evidence by reading documents
"against the grain," weaving together many layers of information to reveal complexities and
working collectively to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Global in scope, this volume
demonstrates innovative research on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in
Spain, Mexico, Tunisia, India, Iran, Poland, Mozambique, and the United States. Addressing
gender, race, class, nationalism, transnationalism, and migration, these essays' subjects include
indigenous women of colonial Mexico, Muslim slave women, African American women of the
early twentieth century, Bengali women activists of pre-independence India, wives and daughters
of Qajar rulers in Iran, women industrial workers in communist Poland and socialist
Mozambique, and women club owners in modern Las Vegas.
Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India, by
Ritty A. Lukose; 2009, 284 pp. This book explores the contemporary cultural politics of
globalization in India, drawing on ethnographic research on youth culture and politics in the
south Indian state of Kerala. Situating the state/region at the intersection of its global reputation
as a "model" of state-centered development and its re-making through extensive migration of
Keralites to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Lukose explores a cultural politics of globalization
as it is articulated in and through the figure of youth, linked to a wider discourse of generational
shift from the era of Nehruvianism to that of liberalization. Lukose argues that tracking forms of
"consumer citizenship" offers a productive way of understanding how a cultural politics of
globalization intersects with changing ideas of the state, democracy and citizenship.
Empathy and Rage: Female Genital Mutilation in African Literature, edited by Tobe Levin
and Augustine H. Asaah; 2009, 218 pp. This pioneering collection discusses representations of
female genital mutilation as a theme in literary art. The contributors—both scholars and
activists—join together to analyze African and African American literature in the context of the
debate between those who see FGM as time-honored tradition and those who see it as an
egregious human rights abuse. (Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd.)
Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, by Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn
Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, eds.; 2009, 296 pp. A unique collection of writings by both
academic and activist scholars on women’s same-sex sexualities and female masculinities in a
globalizing Asia. Through richly detailed studies, contributors explore the emergence of
contemporary lesbian and butch/femme relationships and communities throughout Asia and their
location within the context of nationalist struggles, religious fundamentalism, state gender
regimes, and global queer movements. (Palgrave Macmillan)
Young Female Fighters in African Wars: Conflict and its Consequences, edited by Chris
Coulter, Mariam Persson and Mats Utas; 2008, 51 pp. In the numerous armed conflicts that are
tearing the African continent apart, young women are participants and carry guns alongside their
male comrades-in-arms. Challenging the stereotype of women in African wars as victims only,
this issue of the Nordic Africa Institute Policy Dialogues shows how in modern African wars
women have often been as active as men. Female fighters are victimized, yet they are not mere
victims. Girls and young women who volunteer to fight often possess quite considerable strength
and independence. Programs for disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating former fighters must
be based on a better understanding of the range of women’s roles and experiences in war and
post-war settings in order to act in a gender-sensitive way and to empower this group of women
in the aftermath of war. (Nordiska Afrikainstituet)