Feminist Issues: Race, Class and Sexuality, Fifth Edition (5th Edition)

Feminist Issues positions women’s issues at the forefront of Canadian concerns.  Authors explore the range and diversity of contemporary feminist perspectives as seen through the lens of race, class, sexuality, disability, and poverty. Each chapter addresses questions and social problems that have received little attention in Canadian writing.

The editor, Nancy Mandell, has an excellent and widely-known reputation in the areas of women’s and gender studies, and this collection offers a forum for all of the leading researchers and educators in Canada.  The result is an innovative, challenging, and comprehensive survey of Canadian feminist issues today.

EDITOR

 

NANCY MANDELL teaches in the Sociology and Women’s Studies programs at York University. She has published on a variety of topics: midlife women’s experiences of intimacy and family; gendered social capital; parental involvement in children’s schoolwork; academic-community research partnerships; violence against women; and the feminization of poverty in Canada.

 

CONTRIBUTORS

 

SHANA L. CALIXTE is a PhD candidate in the School of Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto. She holds an MA in Women’s Studies and a Bachelor of Journalism and Women’s Studies from Carleton University in her home city, Ottawa. Her current academic work explores histories of Caribbean Girl Guide movements, focusing on the intersections of girlhood, sexuality, and empire-building within this colonial organization. She currently teaches in the Women’s Studies Department at Thorneloe College, Laurentian University.

 

ANN DUFFY is Professor, Department of Sociology, Brock University, where she is also cross-appointed to the Labour Studies Program and is active in the Masters in Social Justice and Equity Studies Program. Her research interests include women and violence, gendered patterns of employment, and women and aging. Her published work includes Canadian Society (co-edited), Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs (co-edited), Family Violence: A Canadian Introduction, and Connection, Compromise and Control: Canadian Women Discuss Midlife (co-authored). She is currently completing a co-edited collection on work in the “new economy.”

 

AMBER GAZSO is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, York University.  Her research interests include: feminist conceptualizations of the family; transformations in intimate relations; individualization and risk society theory; social citizenship, social policy and the welfare state; and the feminization and racialization of poverty. Her recent publications focus on transformations in mothers’ and fathers’ social citizenship rights to social assistance and subsequent changes in their market and family care relations. Her current research explores how diverse families manage poverty intergenerationally through networks of social support.

 

DIANA L. GUSTAFSON is Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, and affiliate faculty, Department of Women’s Studies, Memorial University. These positions allow her to pursue her commitment to health-related equity and social justice issues in teaching, research, and community life. Her concern for the health needs of marginalized populations has resulted in publications about newcomer women, Aboriginal and

Labradorean peoples, people who inject drugs, and the elderly disabled. Her book, Unbecoming Mothers: The Social Construction of Maternal Absence (2005), explores how women negotiate their lives apart from their children and how they recreate their identities and family structures.

 

JENNIFER L. JOHNSON is a lecturer in Women’s Studies, Thorneloe College, Laurentian University, and a PhD candidate at the School of Women’s Studies at Toronto’s York University. She holds degrees from Queen’s University and the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on international trade relations between Canada and the English-speaking Caribbean, using feminist anti-imperialist critiques of globalization. She has worked at Canada’s federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, assisting in research on the export activities of Canadian businesswomen. She acts as management counsel on gender equity in sound management practice at the Manitoba Institute of Management. Her publications include research on the impact of globalization on local communities and the history of women’s education in Canada.

 

LARA KARAIAN is a PhD candidate in the School of Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto. She holds an MA in Women’s Studies (York) and an Honours Bachelor of Sociology and Criminology (University of Toronto). Her research interests include: feminist, postmodern, and queer legal theory; critical legal strategies; and anti-oppression activism through the use of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canadian human rights law. Lara is a co-editor of Turbo Chicks: Talking Young Feminisms (Sumach, 2001) and was a member of the guest editorial board for Canadian Woman Studies’ Young Women: Feminists, Activists, Grrrls issue (20—21[1], 2001).

 

ALLYSON MITCHELL is an Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. Her research interests include body image and size activism, geographies of power, independent cultural production, and queer art and politics. Her writing is published in Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (Arsenal, 2002), Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (Penguin, 2002), and the forthcoming Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art (Duke, 2008), as well as various independent publications. Allyson is an internationally exhibited visual artist and filmmaker. Her lesbian feminist sasquatch monsters can be seen on her website www.allysonmitchell.com, and her films can be previewed at www.cfmdc.org.

 

MAKI MOTAPANYANE is a PhD candidate in Women’s Studies at York University.  Her research interests include the history of feminist theory and practice in South Africa, women’s movements of the global South, and the politics of transnational feminist coalitions.  She has published academically on Canadian women in hip hop. Her poetry appears in a number of independent Canadian publications, audio recordings, and performances for Canadian Atlantic Jazz festivals and productions.

 

BOBBY NOBLE is an Assistant Professor in the Sexuality Studies program, housed in the School of Women’s Studies at York University (Toronto). Bobby is the author of the recently published monograph Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence in a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape (Women’s Press, 2006). He is also the author of the monograph Masculinities Without Men? (University of British Columbia Press, 2004), listed as a Choice Outstanding Title, 2004; and was co-editor of The Drag King Anthology, a 2004 Lambda Literary Finalist (Harrington Press, 2003).

 

RAIMUNDA REECE is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. Her research focuses on exploring how Canadian capitalist regimes of incarceration and detention are mediated through a racialized and gendered lens in relation to federally sentenced Black women in Canada. She has coordinated projects and conducted workshops that focus on ethno-racial and culturally conscious approaches to eradicating violence against women and children. In addition, she works as the Women’s Prison Worker for the Prisoners with HIV/AIDS Support Action Network. She is a member of the Prisoners’ Justice Action Committee.

 

CARLA RICE is an Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at Trent University where she lectures in culture, health, and psychology. A Canadian leader in the field of body image, she is a founding member and former director of innovative initiatives such as the National Eating Disorder Information Centre and the Body Image Project at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. She has worked with school boards, teachers’ organizations, public health departments, industry, and governments at all levels to develop groundbreaking body positive programs for children, adolescents, and adult women. Her award winning research explores body image as not only a health but also an equity issue.  Currently, she is working on Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference, a photography and digital storytelling project designed to give women with disabilities and physical differences the opportunity through their words and images to depict difference in a bold new way. Up-coming projects include a book that explores women’s diverse narratives of embodiment.

 

SHARON ROSENBERG is Associate Professor in Theory/Culture, Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She primarily teaches courses in contemporary feminist and queer theorizing, critiques of modernity, and loss, trauma, and memorialization; she was recently named in Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities as one of the University of Alberta’s most popular instructors. Key publications include: Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma, with Roger I. Simon and Claudia Eppert, editors (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and Troubling Women’s Studies: Pasts, Presents and Possibilities, co-authored with Ann Braithwaite, Susan Heald, and Susanne Luhmann (Sumach Press, 2004). She was guest editor of torquere (vol. 6, 2004/5) on “Memorializing queers/queering remembrances.” Forthcoming work includes essays in...