Gender
Harriet Bradley
Overview
Gender issues have become an increasingly prominent concern of academics and policy-makers. Although the death of feminism has often been pronounced, feminist ideas still permeate modern thinking. But what exactly do we mean by gender? How can we best understand gender differences? How are current gender relations changing? Are we facing a crisis of masculinity? Is social life being feminized? What would it be like to live in a society in which differences of gender were transcended?
In this lively and accessible book Harriet Bradley provides an introduction to the concept of gender and the different theoretical approaches which have developed within gender studies. Utilizing life narratives, she explores contemporary relations of masculinity and femininity and investigates processes of gendering in three important spheres of contemporary social life: production, reproduction and consumption. The book highlights the centrality of gender in everyday life and shows how thinking about gender is influenced by changing political contexts, considering the options for a transformative politics of gender.
This book will be of interest to students across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in contemporary relations between women and men.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- In and Out of the Frame: a Personal History of Gender
- Chapter One. What’s in a Name?
- Gendering and Class: Growing up Girl, Growing up Boy
- Chapter Two . Gender and Modernity
- Being a Man in the Twenty-first Century
- Chapter Three. Gender and Postmodernity
- Sisters Under the Skin? Identities in a Global Age
- Chapter Four. Gendered Worlds : Production
- Having it All: Family and Employmen in Women’s Lives
- Chapter Five. Gendered Worlds: Reproduction
- Men and Me: Arrangements Between the Sexes
- Chapter Six. Gendered Worlds: Consumption
- It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Gendered Utopias
- Conclusion What the Future holds: Gender, Theory and Politics