Judith Halberstam (Course Reader)

Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego where she teaches gender studies, queer theory, film and literature. She has written on gothic literature, postmodernism, masculinity and queer performance. She is also the film reviewer for Girlfriends magazine. She has become one of the best known gender theorist in our times. She is author of the book Female masculinity, the first full length study on this subject, offering a distinctive alternative to male masculinity. "As Halberstam demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders." About Female masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998.

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Sandra Harding (389)

Harding, a philosopher, is Professor of Education and Women's Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives, The Science Question in Feminism (winner of the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association), and Is Science Multi-Cultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. She co-authored The Gender Dimension of Science and Technology in 1996 UNESCO World Science Report. Dr. Harding has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, and the Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich.

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bell hooks (Feminism is for Everybody)

Writer, professor, and social critic, hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, adopted the name of her maternal great-grandmother, a woman known for speaking her mind. Her books reflect her position as a bold interpreter of contemporary culture in terms of race, class, and gender: Ain't I a Woman (1981), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989); Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990), Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (1994), a memoir, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), among others. She has taught literature, women's studies, and African American studies at Yale University, Oberlin College, and City College of New York and continues to teach and to write poetry and social criticism.

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Karen Horney (127)

Unlike Freud's belief that biology determines an individual's future, Horney believed that gender identity, behavior, and sexual orientation are a result of experiences and not biology. Even though these feminist psychologists believed the lack of a penis was influential on a young woman's life, it was simply because society empowers men and not because women felt themselves to be defective. Horney believed female inferiority stems from social subordination and not castration. In her mind, women were symbolically castrated by the patriarchal society because it denied women the power a penis represents. Women in this system are forced into feminine roles and then forced to enjoy the subordinate position they have taken in society. According to Horney, as soon as women begin to see themselves as men's equals, society will no longer hold this power over them. Her works include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), Self-Analysis (1942), Our Inner Conflicts (1945), and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950).

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Mother Jones (106)

Born Mary Harris, she became a full-time trade union organizer. Specializing in helping miners in their fight for decent wages, improved working conditions and an end to child labour. Her work involved making speeches, recruiting members and organizing soup kitchens and women's auxiliary groups during strikes. After the formation of the United Mine Workers Union in 1890, Jones became one of its officials. Jones, who by the 1890s, was in her sixties, was always affectionately called Mother Jones by the other trade unionists.

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