Gender Struggles : Practical Approaches to Contemporary Feminism

Contemporary feminist theory and postmodernism have left significant marks on how we think about practical matters, most notably the old and new forms of gender struggles that many women confront in their daily lives.

The essays collected in "Gender Struggles" are designed to highlight those influences by addressing the following questions: What is practical feminism in a postmodern world?

How does rethinking the nature and boundaries of philosophy affect the way we understand practical issues that we confront daily?

What new forms of freedom, autonomy, subjectivity, social welfare, motherhood, public and private space, and political resistance have emerged from that?

Together, the 16 essays in this volume represent many different voices of feminists who boldly take up familiar, everyday concerns from unorthodox vantage points within new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. A wide range of issues in gender struggles are addressed, from the more familiar ones that for the last 30 years have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship (such as motherhood, beauty and sexual violence), to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism (such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech and queer politics), and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing (such as adoption, care work and the home).