Gender Relations in Global Perspective : Essential Readings

Faced with an increasingly diverse student population, an expanding field of gender scholarship, and an academic emphasis on multidisciplinarity, social science professors often struggle to address and integrate such a broad array of gender issues in their courses. This book addresses that challenge by increasing students' understandings of gender relations in multiple social fields across time and space.

Gender Relations in Global Perspective is truly multidisciplinary. It is partially drawn from the work of sociologists, but articles written by gender scholars from the disciplines of cultural studies, history, political science, geography, and literary theory are also included. The readings examine historically persistent, cross-culturally relevant, and empirically grounded concerns such as men's position in the family and women's relationship to work, media, and the global economy, as well as the gendered problems of violence, sexuality and reproduction, and racism.

This book presents an engaging range of comparative and cross-cultural gender analyses from various world regions, including the Middle East, South Asia, South East Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa. As the articles are dialogically situated in this text, readers will be able to analyse gender similarities and differences around the globe and learn about the diversity of gender experiences across cultures and regions. This range of analyses demonstrates how a global perspective enriches feminist analyses.

Students will quickly learn that to investigate gender dynamics adequately, attention must be paid simultaneously to the processes of racialization, class, colonialism and imperalism, and sexuality that interweave with gender to produce complex forms of oppression.

Nancy Cook is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brock University, where she teaches courses that concentrate on gender relations, sexuality, contemporary social theory, and qualitative methodology.