Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — Sociology — African and African American Studies

This collection is nothing short of an intellectual feast for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who relish one anothers investigations and insights.  Twenty-three expert contributors capture the theoretical complexities that surface and the visionary horizons that appear through astute consideration of critically selected and compelling topics, held up to the scrutiny of gender studies.  Exploration of culture, globalization, identity, justice, language, nature, religion, and 14 other equally provocative areas of focus for feminist scholarship presents readers with a sense of participation in a series of advanced seminar sessions that are almost uniformly rewarding.  Even with necessarily dense subject matter to navigate, only rarely does an entry achieve its purpose through such specialized discourse that accessibility will be limited to a small circle.  Almost all of the contributors have accomplished a rich and engaging treatment of the terms illuminated here through the fertile questions that a gender lens brings into focus.  Taken as a whole, the essays convey an impressive reflection of progress and intellectual courage from which readers already familiar with feminist inquiry will take inspiration.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

The work of seven editors, this important addition to ongoing conversations in gender studies and feminist activism is methodologically and politically diverse.  The 36 chapters are grouped into five major sections, each of five to eight chapters: "Epistemology and Marginality"; "Literary, Visual and Cultural Representation"; "Sexuality"; "Economy"; and "War, Violence and Militarization."  But the collection is also rigorous and focused.  Indeed, one of the volumes major contributions is the implicit and explicit insistence of nearly all of its contributors that even as readers become acquainted with what is now a well-established, if multifaceted, fieldfeminist theorythese same readers remain aware of the contradictions and tensions inherent in feminism as theory and feminism as lived experience.  By taking these tensions as an organizing principal, however, the editors also shy away from the more radical, contemporary writing in feminist scholarship.  A number of central terms or concepts in traditional feminist epistemologysuch as agency, equality, or, for that matter, genderare undertheorized or taken for granted in the collection.  However, as an overview of feminist theory and public engagement, the book is a necessary read.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.