Women, Gender, and Families of Color is edited by Jennifer Hamer of the University of Kansas.

The inaugural issue, due out in early 2013, is a collection of articles that explore various elements of Black senior women’s sexuality, including body image; sexual and reproductive health; and the politics of race, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation on Black sexuality. It is guest-edited by Bette Dickerson, Associate Professor of Sociology at American University and past president of the Association of Black Sociologists, and Nicole Rousseau, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kent State University and award-winning author of Black Woman’s Burden; Commodifying Black Reproduction (Palgrave Macmillan)

Visit the journal page for information about submitting and/or subscribing.

Read the full press release.

The University of Illinois Press is pleased to announce a new series, Dissident Feminisms, which seeks new feminist writing that traverses the fault lines of epistemology and power, particularly the relationship between social action, activism and theory. Featuring work by scholar-activists with critical and praxis-oriented methods, this interdisciplinary series seeks to intervene in conversations of critical import in a number of fields. We plan to foster rigorous feminist engagement with the enduring, intractable problems of our time: racisms; genocides; war and occupation; heteronormative, communitarian and state violence; militarism; and struggles for livelihood and basic human rights.
 
Dissident Feminisms seeks writing that breaks taboos. We will feature feminist analyses that combine radical critique with work towards progressive social change. The series is particularly interested in bridging the gaps between transnational and postcolonial feminist scholars, activists, and organizers and the work of U.S., immigrant, and native women of color. It will create space for radically plural critiques that combine analytic rigor with accessibility. The series will feature lucid and compelling academic monographs, edited collections that bring together a number of voices in focused, critical, and timely dialogue, and other writings that pointedly intervene in these urgent feminist conversations.

Please direct all questions and submissions to:

Larin McLaughlin
Senior Acquisitions Editor
University of Illinois Press
1325 South Oak St.
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
larinmc@uillinois.edu

The more prominent message of this “seduction kit” is an endorsement of female sexual pleasure and sexual assertiveness. Is it easier for women to demand safe sex  if they do so under the guise of an entitlement to sexual pleasure?
  
Several of the other products sold in the 15,000 washroom vending machines operated by Perform Marketing in the UK also promote both male and female sexual pleasure (though none other than the condoms promote safe sex).   According to their website, “washroom vending provides solutions for distress, impulsive and anonymous purchases.”   For the “implusive” buying price of 8.88 pounds, pub-goers may purchase herbal supplements to enhance sexual performance and pleasure in two varieties, Bleu Zeus for men and Pink Venus for women, or a water-proof stimulator ring  (with battery life up to 40 min.) advertised to “provide the ultimate sexual buzz for him and her.”

On the one hand, the fact that women’s sexual pleasure is now so routinely understood to be as legitimate as that of men’s is surely a good sign.  On the other hand, it is doubtful if any of these products actually enhance sexual pleasure, but are rather simply a way for the product producers, vending machine companies, and pubs to “exploit profitable market trends?”  But if the cultural acceptability of women’s sexual pleasure evident in these products makes it more likely that male partners will be willing to use condoms, should they not be not be welcomed as a feminist technologies, while at the same time understanding that a “cultural fix” is needed to bring women’s sense of entitlement to safe sex to the new, welcome level of culturally acceptability that sexual pleasure now appears to hold?

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Linda L. Layne is the Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and a professor of anthropology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She co-edited the book Feminist Technology.

I refer here not to the perennial questions of whether one can be ‘pretty’ and still a feminist or whether one can wear (or adorn one’s kindle or phone in) pink, and still be a feminist, though these questions remain compelling for my students almost all of whom began the course unwilling to label themselves feminist. 

I’m thinking now of the role of fashion in consumer culture and whether its pervasiveness serves women well or ill.  ‘Fashion’ is one of the primary means for getting people to buy goods they don’t need.

According to Strasser (1999:188), in her book on the social history of trash, middle-class Americans women were introduced to the concept of fashion through clothing in the 1850s, and the notion had been extended to many other items by the 1920s. It was at this time, for instance, that bathroom fixtures started to be available in different colors.

As Sallie Han notes in her comment to my previous post, when we personalize mass produced items with fashion accessories, we often do so with other mass produced, often gendered items. 

From an ecological, socialist, or existential feminist position, the spread of ‘fashion’ to every increasing range of cheap, mass-produced goods, such as the ‘fashionable’ pill pack is not in women’s best interest (or men’s either). At an individual level, it’s a waste of money, is probably made by underpaid, toxically-exposed women in the South, uses nonrenewable resources to produce and transport, and when it ends up in a landfill will be nonbiodegradable.

Does this form of self-expression serve women well? How do such products extend their capacities, and/or further their life projects?

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Linda L. Layne is the Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and a professor of anthropology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She co-edited the new book Feminist Technology.

The page proofs of Feminist Technology were ready in time for me to give the book a trial run in my spring course, Women Leaders/Feminist Entrepreneurs. As anticipated, the students really connected with the material. Always keen discussants, they were exceptionally animated and engaged with the chapters on tampons, birth control pills, and home pregnancy tests, items with which they had personal experience.

In discussing the two-edged sword of being able to pass as a non-menstruating woman by using tampons, the discussion turned to similar issues with regard to the birth control pill. Before I knew it several of the students in this all-female class had whipped out their pill packs to illustrate the point. One student used an Ortho brand case which a flower on it which she explained was designed to look like a compact, i.e., to disguise the pills, and present them to the casual viewer as a makeup tool (something appropriately feminine) rather than a tool for non-reproductive sex (something for which one should/would feel embarrassed). A google search led me to an article by Dawn Stacey (2009) where I learned that my student’s case was one of a line of “stylish pill compacts” developed by Ortho in 2002 “that allow women to be fashionably discreet while feeling at ease carrying pills on the go. . . . There are several designs, including limited editions by fashionista Nicole Miller, who is ‘passionate about continuing to design fashionable compacts for the Pill since it allows women to feel confident and helps them live a more balanced lifestyle.’” One company, Cover Me Crazy, urges women to “Perk Up Your Purse!” promising that with their pill and condom covers  “no longer will you have to be embarrassed about carrying your birth control pills or loose condoms in your purse.”

There are two issues: 1) Does making a pill pack “fashionable” make them more or less feminist? And, 2) Does disguising pill packs as non-sexual tools make them more or less feminist?

*****

Linda L. Layne is the Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and a professor of anthropology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She co-edited the new book Feminist Technology.