Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged gender discrimination

King Kong Theory: A Manifesto For Women Who Can’t Or Won’t Obey The Rules

King Kong Theory is most easily my favourite read so far this year; it packs a punch and voices everything I feel about our oppressive patriarchal society. This work is completely free of any hesitation to say what is really going on in the Western world today. Virginie Despentes blew me away with her fresh and honest analysis of what women (and men) struggle within their half-baked, destructive gender roles.

Gender Stereotyping: Transnational Legal Perspectives

Gender stereotypes are often studies in contradiction. They can be insidious or glaringly apparent; they are hostile, and occasionally operate out of “benign” sexism. The customs and mores of the society, the media that is consumed in that society, the predominant religion of a culture, and the family unit can all commingle in order to perpetuate gender stereotypes.

Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II

Science on the Home Front is an introduction to the lives and tasks of specific women scientists involved in the war effort, from Marie Curie to Margaret Mead. These women come from a variety of backgrounds and pursuits in science. A professor, Jack focuses on the fields of psychology, anthropology, physics and nutrition to elaborate on the women involved who played a specific role in the war.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life

Anyone who has ever been interested in the history of feminism knows of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As author Lori D. Ginzberg notes, much of the focus has shifted towards Anthony, leaving few to know about Stanton.

Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority

As the title indicates, Patsy Mink is the story of a woman of the same name, the first Asian American woman and the first woman of color elected to the U.S. Congress. If her story began and ended there, Mink’s life would have been important enough to have made history. Fortunately for every woman who lives in the world she transformed, Patsy Mink’s story and her life were far greater than that. Born in Maui, Hawaii in 1927, Mink faced a world where opportunities for people who shared her race and gender were all but nonexistent.

Shooting Women

Award-winning Director of Photography Joan Hutton says that when she was starting out in the film industry she received absolutely no help from anyone. Even after she’d built up a substantial résumé of work experience and won prestigious awards she continued to experience discrimination. A directing position that she’d interviewed for was once given to a lesser-experienced young male who’d only been out of film school for three years.

Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention

In periods of rapid social change, the poets of one ideological system or another rush to find the cogent metaphor or, more recently, the winning soundbite, that will interpret the change to suit their own ends, to control meaning. To find and sell the right descriptive phrase is to raise the flag of possession over a historical event. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—or, even more stridently, the U.S.

No Girls in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball

The premise of No Girls in the Clubhouse is that baseball could be successfully gender-integrated at all levels with no disadvantage to either side, but social expectations—not biological deficiency—exclude women from full participation in the sport. Feminists won't be surprised to learn how, in anthropologist Marilyn Cohen's analysis, the historical achievements of female baseball players have been obscured.

No Country for Young Girls

No Country for Young Girls is a twenty-five minute question posed to India: "How can this country move forward while there is still profound gender discrimination against females?" Director Nupur Basu introduces twenty-seven-year-old Vyjanthi, a mother of a three-year-old daughter. When she becomes pregnant with another girl, her husband and in-laws pressure her to an abortion. She flees to her parents’ house to weigh her options. Should she leave her husband and raise her daughters on her own?