Provoking Agents

Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice

Author: Edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner

Wide-ranging essays on empowering women to become activists

Paper – $30

978-0-252-06418-0

Publication Date

Paperback: 01/01/1995

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About the Book

Wide-ranging essays on empowering women to become activists

Both the women's liberation movement and those who have studied it characterize agency as the capacity to make change in individual consciousness, personal lives, and society. The contributors to Provoking Agents explore whether, and how, feminist theory, writing, and other social practices can help people move beyond seeing women as powerless and effect changes in their own lives that lead to social activism. Topics range from maternal surrogacy to writing, from consciousness-raising to AIDS activism, and from pornography to local organizing.

About the Author

Judith Kegan Gardiner is a professor emerita in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is the editor of Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theories and coeditor of the International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities.

Reviews

"A major contribution in women's studies and in other disciplines dealing with issues of agency. The authors raise issues that are very important and they raise them as they must be raised—by bridging theory and action."
—Kathryn Pine Addelson, author of Moral Passages: Toward a Collectivist Moral Theory