WGS 200 - Women's and Gender Studies

This book examines the conversations around gendered mental health in contemporary Western media culture. Using discourse analysis and digital ethnography to study contemporary representations of mental illness and sadness in Western popular media and social media, this book takes a feminist media studies approach to popular discourse, understanding the conversations happening around mental health in these sites to function as scripts for how to think about and experience mental illness and sadness.

This reference book provides an overview of the daily life of women through history, and a timeline highlights key events in women's history. It draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations

People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically across time and cultures. The family is not a'natural'phenomenon but an institution with a dynamic history stretching 10,000 years into the past. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner tell the story of this fundamental unit from the beginnings of domestication and human settlement. They consider the codification of rules governing marriage in societies around the ancient world, the changing conceptions of family wrought by the heightened pace of colonialism and globalization in the modern world, and how state policies shape families today.

Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the questions of why and in which ways gender equality has become contested in various political contexts.

If pictures can be sexist, can analyzing sound reveal sexism, too? Where is the language to discuss sexism in music? LJ Müller tackles these important questions in their 2018 German book titled Sound und Sexismus, which was awarded the IASPM 2019 book prize. Analyzing the voices of Kurt Cobain, Kate Bush, Björk and others, Müller demonstrates how gender is performed vocally and interacts with gendered aspects of embodiment and affect.

At no other point in human history have the definitions of "woman" and "man," "male" and "female," "masculine" and "feminine," been more contentious than now. This book advances a pragmatic approach to the act of defining that acknowledges the important ethical dimensions of our definitional practices. Increased transgender rights and visibility has been met with increased opposition, controversy, and even violence. Who should have the power to define the meanings of sex and gender? What values and interests are advanced by competing definitions? How has growing recognition of intersex conditions challenged our definitions of sex/gender?