In this innovative book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the founding editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber argues that gender is wholly a product of socialization, subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation, and that it is a social institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize positions of power.

Paradoxes of gender

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Social psychologists have held that when selecting mates women prefer older men and men prefer younger women. In a form of economic exchange based on conventional sex role norms both men and women seek potential partners who are similar to themselves. Behavioral psychologists have proposed an evolutionary model to explain age preferences. The social exchange model does not explain what cross cultural research which is that men and women in other cultures differ in ways that are parallel to gender differences in US society. The evolutionary model submits that men and women pursue distinct reproductive strategies. It also theorizes a more complicated relationship between gender and age preferences than the social exchange model. 2 behavioral psychologists have conducted 6 studies to determine whether the evolutionary model holds true. The hypothesis states that during the early years men prefer women who are only somewhat younger than they are but as they are they prefer women who are considerably younger than they are. On the other hand young women prefer men who are slightly older than they are and this preference does not change much with age. The psychologists examined age preferences in personal advertisements from newspapers in Arizona West Germany the Netherlands and India and in singles advertisements by financially successful US women and men in the Washington D.C. They found the results consistently fit well with the evolutionary model. They also studied marriage statistics from Seattle Washington and Phoenix Arizona which also supported the hypothesis. They conducted a cross-generational analysis using 1923 marriage statistics from Phoenix which indicated consistency across generations. A study of marriages that took place between 1913 and 1939 on the small island of Poro in the Philippines also supported the theory. Thus psychologists should expand previous models of age preferences to incorporate the life history position.

Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in human reproductive strategies.

The issue addressed here is whether the spread of rationalization, or what I have termed `McDonaldization', is inexorable. That issue is examined spatially and temporally. Spatially, what we are wi...

The McDonaldization Thesis: Is expansion inevitable?

Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine

Body/Politics demonstrates how many of the controversies in modern science involve or invoke the feminine body as their battleground. This groundbreaking collection addresses such scientific issues as artificial fertilization, the "crisis" in childbirth management,and the medical invention of "female" maladies and the debates surrounding them. In the process it makes an important attempt to remedy the traditional division between science and non-science by focusing on the interconnection of literary, social, and scientific discourses concerning the female body. The editors have brought together noted feminist scholars and critics from various fields. Contributers include Susan Bordo, Mary Ann Doane, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Mary Poovey and Paula A. Treichler.

Body/politics : women and the discourses of science

Reading woman: Essays in feminist criticism

Tradition and experiment in Wordsworth's lyrical ballads (1798)

The Difference of View Mary Jacobus 1 Towards a Feminist Poetics Elaine Showalter 2 The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in 'Villette' Mary Jacobus 3 The Indefinite Disclosed: Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson Cora Kaplan 4 Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf Gillian Beer 5 Sue Bridehead and the New Woman John Goode 6 Ibsen and the Language of Women Inga-Stina Ewbank 7 Poetry and Conscience: Russian Women Poets of the Twentieth Century Elaine Feinstein 8 Writing as a Woman Anne Stevenson 9 Feminism, Film and the Avant-garde Laura Mulvey

Mary Jacobus

Papers

Body/politics : women and the discourses of science

Reading woman: Essays in feminist criticism

Tradition and experiment in Wordsworth's lyrical ballads (1798)

Women Writing and Writing about Women

Reading the Slender Body