Gender PoliticsBooks

A chilling investigation into the 1990 murder of Keri Sullivan, exploring the cultural obsession with violence against women, the failures of the justice system, and the psychological toll on survivors and investigators.

Veteran financial journalist Josie Cox's groundbreaking work telling the story of how women have fought for financial freedom and the social and political hurdles that have kept them from equality. From WWII 'Rosies' to the investor who broke into the New York Stock Exchange boys' club, this work chronicles centuries of women's relentless struggle for money and power, while revealing challenges women still face today.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock's groundbreaking investigative work exploring what few dare to confront: the role and necessity of female-led violence when institutional protections completely fail. Through three immersive narratives of real women who fought back, this book challenges us to rethink what justice, self-defense, and women's safety truly mean.

Culture writer Marcie Bianco boldly argues that 'equality' is a racist, patriarchal ideal that perpetuates women's systemic oppression and limits the possibilities of feminism - with a plan to transform the movement.

Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini's groundbreaking exploration challenging assumptions that male dominance is natural to the human species. Through archaeology, scientific research, and global cultural histories, this book reveals how patriarchy emerged around 7,000 years ago, spread through colonialism, and why understanding this history is crucial for achieving genuine gender equality.

Louise Perry challenges a sexual liberalism that treats consent and choice as a complete ethic, foregrounding gendered risk while inviting scrutiny of her biological essentialism, marital prescription, and limited engagement with queer and sex-worker perspectives.

Six interlocking essays move from rape allegations, pornography, desire, and teacher - student relations to the carceral state and capitalism, refusing to reduce sexual politics to the claim that consent alone settles every question.

Marie Hicks rewrites the history of British computerization by showing how women’s computing labor was demoted from core expertise into low-paid, low-status work.

Laura Sjoberg examines rare but revealing cases of female perpetrators of wartime sexual violence and how law and media make sense of them.

Ifi Amadiume’s study of Nnobi society separates social roles such as daughter and husband from anatomical sex, while tracing how colonial rule narrowed women’s political and economic authority.

Laura Sjoberg offers an accessible but rigorous account of how gender orders shape the causes, conduct, narration, and aftermath of war.

Laura Sjoberg argues that gender and gender subordination are central to the making, fighting, and interpretation of global conflict.

Through rulings on citizenship, family, health, property, and violence, this casebook examines how Latin American courts expand or restrict women’s and LGBTI rights.

Janet Abbate traces the historical shift from women’s high participation in computing work to the formation of masculinized professional identity.

Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via assemble seventeen interdisciplinary feminist essays on how gender organizes military institutions, wartime violence, peacebuilding, and public memory.

Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry analyze how violent women in global politics are explained away through gendered stories of motherhood, monstrosity, or sexuality.

Virginie Despentes' 'King Kong Theory' is a punk-rock manifesto of modern feminism. Part memoir, part critical theory, it is a raw, angry, and undeniably powerful examination of gender, sexuality, and violence. Despentes writes from the margins - as a former sex worker, a rape survivor, and a punk artist - challenging the sanitized, respectable versions of feminism to embrace the 'ugly', the 'unfuckable', and the dangerous.

Judy Wajcman rejects technological determinism and argues that technology and gender are co-produced social relations.

A historical collection on gender, state formation, citizenship, family, law, and power in Latin America.

Cynthia Cockburn studies women’s cooperation across Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, and Bosnia-Hercegovina to understand gender, nationalism, and democratic difference.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues that Western scholarship projected a body-centered gender hierarchy onto Yoruba society, forcing feminist analysis to confront the colonial history of its own categories.

A study of women in socialist Cuba, examining revolution, sexuality, work, family, and state gender policy.

Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the myths of men as just warriors and women as beautiful souls in Western political imagination.

This groundbreaking work fundamentally redefined feminist theory's understanding of gender by introducing the theory of gender performativity. Butler challenges the notion that gender is a biological fact or fixed identity, arguing that gender is produced through repetitive performative acts - a theoretical framework that radically transformed feminist theory, queer theory, and gender studies.

Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias’s edited volume examines how nationalism, state formation, family policy, and women’s political roles shape one another.

This groundbreaking work challenges male-centric theories of moral development, proposing an alternative model of moral reasoning based on care, relationships, and responsibility. By listening to women's voices, Gilligan discovered the 'ethics of care' as a different moral voice, fundamentally transforming psychology's, ethics', and feminist theory's understanding of moral development.