avatar

deardiarylovechloe

šŸŒ±šŸ³ļøā€šŸŒˆšŸ§µšŸµ she/her Perpetually reading sapphic romance, fashion anything and activist lit

1497 points

0% overlap
Sapphic Across Genres
Level 4
Made for the Movies
My Taste
Dream On, Ramona Riley
Iris Kelly Doesn't Date
Hijab Butch Blues
A Short History of Trans Misogyny
Sunrise on the Reaping
Reading...
The Handmaid’s Tale
0%
Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay
38%
avatar

deardiarylovechloe is interested in reading...

2w

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

OyĆØrónkẹ́ OyěwùmĆ­

The ā€œwoman question,ā€ this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of ā€œwoman,ā€ central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age. A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.

0
avatar

deardiarylovechloe is interested in reading...

9w

Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

Justine van der Leun

A groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the deeply reported stories of three unforgettable women When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun first reported on the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see how women were being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. She wondered how often survivors are targeted for prosecution. To find out, she began an intensive, years-long investigation—traveling coast to coast and collecting more than a thousand personal accounts from women’s prisons. In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women, caught in the direst circumstances, who had to kill to survive. Tanisha is a Michigan sex worker and fledgling entrepreneur determined to help detectives solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. Jema is a softhearted factory worker from Missouri, struggling to keep her family together as she navigates an increasingly dangerous relationship. TC is a bold Californian trying, along with her mother, to escape generations of trauma—and a toxic family environment. Each woman was abused in childhood, only to find that abuse replicated in adulthood, until they were ultimately forced to make an impossible choice. A work of literary reportage that feels like the most dynamic crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of intensive, unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in prisons across the United States. It is the story of women and violence in America—and a wake-up call about a system that would rather condemn a woman to life behind bars than face its failings. It is also the moving story of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.

0