Famous Feminists P-R

Emma Pérez

Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is a founding member of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), which translates to "Women Active in Letters and Social Change," an academic organization that articulates Chicana/Latina feminist perspectives. Pérez is the author of a novel Gulf Dreams (Third Woman Press, 1996) and The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Indiana University Press, 1999) Her forthcoming projects include Chicana Feminist Identity Formation and Colonial Discourses: Traversing Borders and Centuries; Mexican American Women in Houston: Work, Family, and Community; and "Tejanas": A History of Texas Mexican Women.

Judith Plaskow: "Jewish Memory from a Feminist Perspective" from Tikkun 1:2

A Jewish feminist theologian and a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College. Her writing and research has centered on feminist theology since she was in graduate school. Her Yale thesis, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, one of the first feminist dissertations in religious studies, has become a feminist theological classic. She was a research associate in women's studies and theology at Harvard Divinity School in the first year of the program (1973-74), and was for many years a member of its advisory board. She was co-chair of the Women and Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion during its second and third years (1972-73), and served on its steering committee for over a decade. http://www.manhattan.edu/arts/rls/faculty/plaskow.html

Radicalesbians: The Woman-Identified Woman

In Melbourne in 1973, women's liberation and gay liberation came together in a vibrant, if somewhat short lived, organization known as Radicalesbians. The radicalesbian struggle was for a genderless society, one that did not differentiate on the basis of sex and which allowed people to relate to each other as people, rather than through their social and gender roles.

Redstockings: "Redstockings Manifesto"

Coined in 1969, the name "Redstockings" combines "bluestockings," the term pinned pejoratively on educated and otherwise strong-minded women in the 18th and 19th centuries, with "red" for social revolution. Redstockings was one of the influential but short-lived radical feminist groups of the Sixties that produced many of the expressions and actions that have become household words to people in the United States--Sisterhood is Powerful, Consciousness-Raising, The Personal is Political, The Politics of Housework, The Pro-Woman Line, The Miss America Protest. In 1973, veterans of the original group reformed Redstockings and incorporated as a non-profit educational and scientific organization for the furtherance of the women’s rights movement and the organized efforts of women to better their situation. Today Redstockings is organizing very much in the original spirit, as a different kind of "think tank"-- grassroots-oriented and down-to-earth--for defending and advancing the women's liberation agenda. Archives for Action is a project Redstockings established in 1989 to make the formative and radical 1960's experience of the movement more widely available for the taking stock needed for new understandings and improved strategies.

 
Adrienne Rich: “Diving into the Wreck”

U.S. poet, scholar, and critic. Born in Baltimore, she was a student at Radcliffe College when her poems were chosen for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series; the resulting volume, A Change of World (1951), reflected her formal mastery. Her subsequent work traces a transformation from well-crafted but imitative poetry to a highly personal and powerful style. Her increasing commitment to the women's movement and a lesbian/feminist aesthetic came to politicize much of her work. Among her collections are Diving into the Wreck (1973, National Book Award) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Her nonfiction Of Woman Born (1976; National Book Award) was widely read. http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/1in10/99/06/RICH.html

 
Gayle Rubin: “Thinking of Sex” from Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

A feminist anthropologist who has written on a wide range of subjects, including anthropological theory, s/m sex, and modern lesbian literature. In this essay, first published in 1984, Rubin argues that in the West, the 1880s, the 1950s, and the contemporary era have been periods of sex panic, periods in which the state, the institutions of medicine, and the popular media have mobilized to attack and oppress all whose sexual tastes differ from those allowed by the currently dominative model of sexual correctness. She also suggests that during the contemporary era the worst brunt of the oppression has been borne by those who practice s/m or cross-generational sex. Rubin maintains that if we are to despise a theory to account for the outbreak and direction of sexual panics, we shall need to base the theory on more than just feminist thinking. Although feminist thinking explains gender injustices, it does not and cannot provide by itself a full explanation for the oppression of sexual minorities. Gayle S. Rubin is presently at work on a collection of her essays -- including her well-known work of theory, The Traffic in Women -- and on a historical and ethnographic account of the gay male leather community of San Francisco. http://ssr1.uchicago.edu/NEWPRE/GenFam2/Rubin.html

Diana Russell: Making Violence Sexy

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