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Celebrate International Women’s Day

 The event has been celebrated on March 8 since 1913.International Women’s Day (IWD) is celebrated all across Europe on March 8, corresponding with Women’s History Month in the United States. In the US March is an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. All around the world, International Women’s day and National Women’s History Month present an opportunity to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women while calling for greater equality! For more information on this year’s theme, events around the globe and on how you can take part in creating a more gender inclusive world please visit internationalwomensday.com.

In recognition of the day Berghahn is pleased to offer 25% discount on any of our Gender Studies books on orders place on our website before the end of March. Visit our webpage and simply enter the code IWD18 at checkout.

Check out a special virtual journal issue here. 


 

GENDER IN GEORGIA
Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation, and History in the South Caucasus
Edited by Maia Barkaia and Alisse Waterston
Afterword by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

 

As Georgia seeks to reinvent itself as a nation-state in the post-Soviet period, Georgian women are maneuvering, adjusting, resisting and transforming the new economic, social and political order. In Gender in Georgia, editors Maia Barkaia and Alisse Waterston bring together an international group of feminist scholars to explore the socio-political and cultural conditions that have shaped gender dynamics in Georgia from the late 19th century to the present. In doing so, they provide the first-ever woman-centered collection of research on Georgia, offering a feminist critique of power in its many manifestations, and an assessment of women’s political agency in Georgia.

Read Introduction: Contextualizing Gender in Georgia: Nation, Culture, Power and Politics

 

MAD MÄDCHEN
Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film
Margaret McCarthy

 

The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement’s strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Mädchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it processes political discourse to define itself through both differences and affinities among women. Ultimately, such a model suggests new ways of re-imagining feminist solidarity across generational, ethnic, and racial lines.

Read Introduction

 

In Paperback

HONOUR AND VIOLENCE
Gender, Power and Law in Southern Pakistan
Nafisa Shah

Volume 39, New Directions in Anthropology

 

The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

Read Introduction: Honour Violence, Law and Power in Upper Sindh

 

THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Impacts and Outcomes
Edited by Kristina Schulz

Volume 22, Protest, Culture & Society

 

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

Read Introduction: A Success without Impact? Case Studies from the Women’s Liberation Movement’s in Europe

 

A FRAGMENTED LANDSCAPE
Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe
Edited by Silvia De Zordo, Joanna Mishtal, and Lorena Anton

Volume 20, Protest, Culture & Society

 

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.

Read Introduction

 

SISTERS IN ARMS
Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968
Katharina Karcher

Volume 38, Monographs in German History

 

Few figures in modern German history are as central to the public memory of radical protest than Ulrike Meinhof, but she was only the most prominent of the countless German women—and militant male feminists—who supported and joined in revolutionary actions from the 1960s onward. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements.

Read Introduction

 

New in Paperback

WAR AND WOMEN ACROSS CONTINENTS
Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences
Edited by Shirley Ardener, Fiona Armitage-Woodward, and Lidia Dina Sciama

 

“Interesting and timely. Using different research methods to arrive at the story of women involved in war and conflicts adds value to existing feminist research methods. The academic, and especially feminist, readership will benefit from this volume.” · Nahla Abdo, Carleton University

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War’s aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

Read Introduction: Women’s Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences of War across Continents: An Introduction

 

In Paperback! 

GIRLHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE
Edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler

 

Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

Read Introduction: The Significance of Place in Girlhood Studies

 

NEW IMAGINARIES
Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm
Edited and Translated by Marian J. Rubchak
Foreword Martha Kichorowska Kebalo

 

Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.

Read Introduction

 

GENDER HISTORY IN A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders
Edited by Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug

 

Recent debates have used the concept of “transnational history” to broaden research on historical subjects that transcend national boundaries and encourage a shift away from official inter-state interactions to institutions, groups, and actors that have been obscured. This approach proves particularly fruitful for the dynamic field of global gender and women’s history. By looking at the restless lives and work of women’s activists in informal border-crossings, ephemeral NGOs, the lower management of established international organizations, and other global networks, this volume reflects the potential of a new perspective that allows for a more adequate analysis of transnational activities. By pointing out cultural hierarchies, the vicissitudes of translation and re-interpretation, and the ambiguity of intercultural exchange, this volume demonstrates the critical potential of transnational history. It allows us to see the limits of universalist and cosmopolitan claims so dear to many historical actors and historians.

 

WOMEN AND THE CITY, WOMEN IN THE CITY
A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History
Edited by Nazan Maksudyan

 

“An impressive work of seminal scholarship, Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective of Ottoman Urban History is a compendium of seven original articles… Enhanced with the inclusion of two pages of notes on contributors; an eighteen page bibliography; and a twenty-one page index, Women and the City, Women in the City is an especially recommended addition to academic library Women’s Studies, Turkish Cultural History, and Ottoman History reference collections and supplemental studies reading lists.” · Midwest Book Review

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

 

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN SCANDINAVIA
Women, Migration, and the Diaspora
Edited by Haci Akman

 

“The anthology provides careful analysis based on rich empirical material that illuminates the complexity of the region (and of the migration processes that have occurred in the last thirty years) represented and acted upon as the Nordic…[Its] strength lies in its ability to pose central research questions at the crossroad between the making of the ‘Nordic’ and the original ways through which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation-state. This ability to move between the local and the global through original and reflexive methodologies locates the anthology’s work within a broader international scholarship.” · Diana Mulinari, Center for Gender Studies, University of Lund

Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

 

THE DANCE OF NURTURE
Negotiating Infant Feeding
Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor

Volume 6, Food, Nutrition, and Culture

 

Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

Read Introduction

 

GENDER, VIOLENCE, REFUGEES
Edited by Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Ulrike Krause

Volume 37, Forced Migration

 

Providing nuanced accounts of how the social identities of men and women, the context of displacement and the experience or manifestation of violence interact, this collection offers conceptual analyses and in-depth case studies to illustrate how gender relations are affected by displacement, encampment and return. The essays show how these factors lead to various forms of direct, indirect and structural violence. This ranges from discussions of norms reflected in policy documents and practise, the relationship between relief structures and living conditions in camps, to forced military recruitment and forced return, and covers countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Read Gender, Violence, Refugees. An Introduction

 


Berghahn Journals: 

 

Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History

 

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective. Its contributions cover a rich variety of topics and historical eras, as well as a wide range of methodologies and approaches to the history of women and gender.

Special Journal Issue:
Celebrating 100 Years of International Women’s Day

 

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

WINNER OF THE 2009 AAP/PSP PROSE AWARD FOR BEST NEW JOURNAL IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES! 

 

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines.

Follow Girlhood Studies on Twitter!