Global Obscenities

The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble. New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation. Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.

What makes a photograph of a dead body obscene? Auchter's genealogy of obscenity argues that this process is highly political.

Global Prescriptions is a critical yet optimistic analysis of the role of transnational women's groups in setting the agendas for women's health in international and national settings. The book reviews a decade of women's participation in UN conferences, transnational networks, national advocacy efforts and sexual and reproductive health provision, assessing both their strengths and weaknesses. It critiques the Cairo, Beijing and Copenhagen conference documents and World Bank, WHO and health sector reform policies. It also offers case studies of national-level reform and advocacy efforts and appraises the controversy concerning TRIPS, trade, and essential AIDS drugs. The author takes into account the formidable political and ideological forces confronting global justice movements and also offers a sobering reassessment of transnational women's NGOs themselves and such problems as 'NGOization', fragmentation and donor-dependency. Petchesky argues that the power of women's transnational coalitions is only as great as their organic connection with grassroots social movements.

"Medieval Obscenities examines the complex and contentious role of the obscene - what is offensive, indecent or morally repugnant - in medieval culture from late antiquity through to the end of the middle ages in western Europe. Its approach is multidisciplinary, its methodologies divergent and it seeks to formulate questions and stimulate debate." "The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene. The volume demonstrates not only the vitality of medieval obscenity, but its centrality to our understanding of medieval life."--Jacket.

Global politics has transformed in recent years due to a rise in nationalist ideology, the breakdown of multiple societies, and even nation-state legitimacy. The nation-state, arguably, has been in question for much of the digital age, as citizens become transnational and claim loyalty to many different groups, causes, and in some cases, states. Thus, politics that accompany diasporic communities have become increasingly important focal points of comparative and political science research. Global Diaspora Politics and Social Movements: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides innovative insights into the dispersion of political and social groups across the world through various research methods such as case studies. This publication examines migration politics, security policy, and social movements. It is designed for academicians, policymakers, government officials, researchers, and students, and covers topics centered on the distribution of social groups and political groups.

Misogyny across Global Media argues that, although women’s experiences under misogyny are by no means universal, patriarchal social and institutional systems facilitate gender-based hostility across the globe. Contributors demonstrate how systemic misogyny and power inequities are at the root of women’s suffering at the hands of misogyny, with consequences ranging from sexual harassment to rape and even murder. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of systemic misogyny worldwide, analyzing specific cases such as the controversial Child Marriage Act in Bangladesh, sexual harassment in India’s Bollywood culture, rape culture among military forces in Jammu and Kashmir, the murder of female students in Kenya, and femicide in Turkey. This collection discusses how misogyny creates a clash of cultures between men and women, the powerful and the oppressed, and the conservative and the liberal, and uncovers the evils that are perpetrated against women worldwide as a result of systemic misogyny. Scholars of gender studies, media studies, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.