Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts

Introducing Women’s and Gender Studies approaches feminism in terms of major contributions, debates, and themes and focuses on the connectivity of these debates. The authors introduce a concept (knowledges, bodies, identities, equalities, representations, places, affects) and contextualize it with an introductory essay. The readings associated with each essay—all of them contemporary--take varied perspectives on each topic (e.g. identity and conformity; identity and nonconformity; identity’s relation to biology; identity and sexuality, etc). The readings and introductory essays demonstrate how the topics are interconnected, and allow students to make connections. The companion website will contain teaching tips, bonus readings, and other pedagogical materials.

Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies is a text-reader that offers instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women’s and gender studies. This book highlights major concepts that organize the diverse work in this field: Knowledges, Identities, Equalities, Bodies, Places, and Representations. Its focus on "the everyday" speaks to the importance this book places on students understanding the taken-for granted circumstances of their daily lives. Precisely because it is not the same for everyone, the everyday becomes the ideal location for cultivating students’ intellectual capacities as well as their political investigations and interventions. In addition to exploring each concept in detail, each chapter includes up to five short recently published readings that illuminate an aspect of that concept. Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies explores the idea that "People are different, and the world isn’t fair," and engages students in the inevitably complicated follow-up question, "Now that we know, how shall we live?"