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Pauli Murray (1910–85) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come. In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington D.C. and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt. In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation. This book examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. The book traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from her theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s.

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways—from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other’s perspectives. Medina’s epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

Are girls taking over the world? It would appear so based on magazine covers, news headlines, and popularized books touting girls’ academic success. As a result, many in Western society assume that girls now play on an equal playing field so have nothing to complain about. But contrary to the widespread belief that girls have surpassed the need for support because they are ‘doing well’ in school, smart girls struggle in ways that have been made invisible. Why do some girls choose to dumb down? How do smart girls handle being labeled ‘nerd’ or ‘loner? How do they deal with stress, including the ‘Supergirl’ drive for perfection? How are race and class part of smart girls’ negotiations of academic success? And how do smart girls engage with the sexism that is still present in schools, in spite of messages to the contrary? Set against the powerful backdrops of post-feminism and neo-liberalism where girls are told they now ‘have it all’, Smart Girls sheds light on girls’ varied everyday experiences, strategic negotiations of traditional gender norms, and the savoring of success – all while keeping their eyes on an A+ and a bright future.

This book is a ringing indictment of disability oppression, which, it states, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness and is experienced in some form by five hundred million persons throughout the world who have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. This book provides a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism. The book's analysis is illuminated by interviews conducted over a ten-year period with disability rights activists throughout the Third World, Europe, and the United States. The book finds an antidote for dependency and powerlessness in the resistance to disability oppression that is emerging worldwide. The interviews contain stories of self-reliance and empowerment evoking the new consciousness of disability rights activists. As a latecomer among the world's liberation movements, the disability rights movement will gain visibility and momentum from the elucidation of its history and its political philosophy of self-determination, which is captured in the title of the book. The book expresses the conviction of people with disabilities that they know what is best for them.

This ethnography examines the gendered nature of today's large corporate law firms. Although increasing numbers of women have become lawyers in the past decade, this book discovers that the double standards and sexist attitudes of legal bureaucracies are a continuing problem for women lawyers and paralegals. Working as a paralegal, ethnographic research was carried out in two law offices, its depiction of the legal world is quite unlike the glamorized version seen on television. The book portrays the dilemma that female attorneys face: A woman using tough, aggressive tactics—the ideal combative litigator—is often regarded as brash or even obnoxious by her male colleagues, yet any lack of toughness would mark her as ineffective. Women paralegals also face a double bind in corporate law firms. While lawyers depend on paralegals for important work, they also expect these women—for most paralegals are women—to nurture them and affirm their superior status in the office hierarchy. Paralegals who mother their bosses experience increasing personal exploitation, while those who do not face criticism and professional sanction. Male paralegals, the book finds, do not encounter the same difficulties that female paralegals do. The book argues that this gendered division of labor benefits men politically, economically, and personally. However, it finds that women lawyers and paralegals develop creative strategies for resisting and disrupting the male-dominated status quo.

Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud Süss (1940), for which he had to defend himself in two trials. A detailed portrait of him raises the question whether it is permitted to appreciate the artistic talents of a man who actively supported the Nazi regime’s genocidal politics. There is no precedent for this challenge because none of the leading Nazi criminals produced enduring works of art, whereas Harlan did. Moral questions inevitably arise throughout the book, but another task is the portrait of a man whose function in Nazi Germany didn’t fit into the familiar villain/hero/victim scenario. Harlan was the product of Weimar Germany’s leftist youth movement and after 1933 managed to combine opportunism with a passionate individualism. The body of work he left is intriguing not despite but because of his moral flaws: his mysticism, sentimentality, and sexism as well as, above all, the perception of himself as a philosopher-artist. His preferred genre was melodrama, a canon that deserves to be expanded beyond the films of Douglas Sirk and Frank Borzage. As someone who chiefly addressed female audiences and who allowed his actress-wife Kristina Söderbaum to dominate his oeuvre with her child-bride persona, Harlan is of interest to women’s studies and, with its recurring transgender motives, gay studies as well. Many stimulating articles have been written about individual Harlan films, but so far no one has analyzed them in the context of his biography. The research for this book includes discussions with dozens of people who worked with Harlan or watched all his films, half of which have never been before been analyzed in any language.

In patriarchal cultures, people internalize cultural gender imagery that enshrines procreative heterosexuality and relations of domination and subordination between men and women. Once internalized – i.e., embedded in people's cognitive and emotional infrastructure – this imagery shapes, though it does not determine individual identity. Discernable in perception, imagination, desire, reflection, judgment, and choice, internalized gender imagery not only affects individual self‐knowledge and self‐definition but also affects people's conception of human nature and hence their political principles and ideals. As a result of their ubiquity and potency, patriarchal stereotypes of womanhood interfere with women's self‐determination or, in other words, their autonomy. The book canvasses and critiques a wide range of toxic gender imagery pertaining to issues that are central to women's individual identities, e.g., mother hood, recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse, and beauty ideals. Because women (and men) typically appropriate culturally entrenched tropes, mythic tales, and pictorial images to develop their self‐portraits and self‐narratives, resisting and supplanting patriarchal discursive regimes are crucial to women's agency. It is incumbent on feminists, then, to combat the pernicious effects of these representations of womanhood through a discursive politics that crafts and broadcasts emancipatory gender imagery and that complements feminist demands for equal rights and improved material conditions. Feminist discursive politics have already made some headway, for contemporary psychoanalytic theory and other representational practices provide illustrations of how emancipatory imagery might look. If this discursive campaign is unsuccessful, patriarchal cultures will continue to undercut women's ability to chart their own courses in their day‐to‐day lives, and feminist social and economic gains will be vulnerable to residual misogyny, backlash, and reversal.

The field of black women's history gained recognition as a legitimate field of study only late in the twentieth century. Collecting stories that are both deeply personal and powerfully political, this book compiles seventeen personal narratives by leading black women historians at various stages in their careers. The authors of these narratives illuminate how—first as graduate students and then as professional historians—they entered and navigated the realm of higher education, a world concerned with and dominated by whites and men. In distinct voices and from different vantage points, the personal histories revealed here also tell the story of the struggle to establish a new scholarly field. Black women, alleged by affirmative-action supporters and opponents to be “twofers,” recount how they have confronted racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses. They explore how the personal and the political intersect in historical research and writing, and in the academy. By comparing the experiences of older and younger generations, the book makes visible the benefits and drawbacks of the institutionalization of African American and African American women's history.