Martha McCaughey | |
---|---|
Born | October 25, 1966 |
Occupation | Academic writer |
Language | English |
Education | University of Michigan (B.A.) University of California (MA) University of California (PhD) [1] |
Period | Late 1990s–present |
Subject | Feminism, self-defense, film, cyberactivism, Evolution, movie violence |
Notable works | Real Knockouts |
Martha McCaughey (born October 25, 1966) is an American academic and author. She was the director of Women's Studies at Appalachian State University at, prior to that, at Virginia Tech. Her research and writings have dealt extensively with evolutionary psychology as applied to gender. She is the author of The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science (2008, Routledge), which takes an original perspective on the "science wars" and also challenges both evolutionary psychologists and their feminist critics to think about masculinities as textual.
Among McCaughey's writings are two similarly titled books: Real Knockouts: the Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense ( ISBN 0-8147-5577-1) in 1997 and Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies ( ISBN 0-292-75251-2), which she co-edited in 2001 with Neal King.
Real Knockouts made McCaughey's mark in feminist theory, as the first comprehensive attempt to bridge the gap between academia and mainstream women's self-defense. In it, she defines the self-defense movement serves as a form of feminist empowerment and consciousness raising that can be used to make feminist theory accessible to women who would otherwise be unreceptive. She also proposes the idea that by participating in self-defense, women change the definition of femininity and alter the gender roles, both male and female, that support existing rape culture. Although McCaughey takes a generally positive stance regarding self-defense, and dedicates a chapter to countering various criticisms of women's self-defense from within feminist theory, she does acknowledge and examine several practical and legal concerns with self-defense. As part of that, she analyzes the legal repercussions of violent self-defense, including consideration of the way that racism, classism, sexism, and stereotypes concerning battered wife syndrome affect the legal system's judgement on whether or not a woman's self-defense is legitimate.
Reel Knockouts (co-edited with Neal M. King) is a collection of essays that examine portrayals of violent women in film.
She is also the co-editor, with Michael D. Ayers, of Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (2003, Routledge), and the editor of Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web (2014, Routledge).
Most recently, McCaughey has written a number of essays on feminism, academic freedom, and the purpose of the university.
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Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks's writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays and poetry to children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
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Postcolonial feminism is a form of feminism that developed as a response to feminism focusing solely on the experiences of women in Western cultures and former colonies. Postcolonial feminism seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world. Postcolonial feminism originated in the 1980s as a critique of feminist theorists in developed countries pointing out the universalizing tendencies of mainstream feminist ideas and argues that women living in non-Western countries are misrepresented.
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Materialist feminism highlights capitalism and patriarchy as a central aspect in understanding women's oppression. Under materialist feminism, gender is seen as a social construct, and society forces gender roles, such as rearing children, onto women. Materialist feminism's ideal vision is a society in which women are treated socially and economically the same as men. The theory centers on social change rather than seeking transformation within the capitalist system.
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Martha Albertson Fineman is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. She held the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, first published in 1981 by Persephone Press. The second edition was published in 1983 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. The book's third edition was published by Third Woman Press until 2008, when it went out of print. In 2015, the fourth edition was published by State University of New York Press, Albany.
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Suzanna Danuta Walters is the director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and professor of sociology at Northeastern University, Boston. She is also the editor-in-chief of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the author of several books, including The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality. She is the author of the op-ed "Why can't we hate men?" in The Washington Post.
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All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982) is a landmark feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies printed in numerous editions, co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith.