How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychological differences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities and femininities made? And how is gender entwined in global politics and debates over trans issues?
Raewyn Connell and Tristan Bridges answer these questions and more. Their updated revision provides a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to modern gender studies, covering empirical research from all around the world, in addition to theory and politics. As well as introducing the field, Gender: In World Perspective provides a powerful contemporary framework for gender analysis with a strong and distinctive global awareness. Highlighting the multidimensional character of gender relations, Connell and Bridges show how to link personal life with large-scale organizational structures, and how gender politics changes its form in changing situations.
The fifth edition of this influential book brings the statistical picture of gender inequalities up to date, offering new close-focus case studies of gender research. Like previous editions, it examines gender politics and global power relations, but with added discussion around contemporary issues of intersectionality, populism and “anti-gender” politics, gender-based violence, trans struggles, and environmental change. It also speaks at the intimate level, about embodied gender and personal relationships.
Gender moves from personal experience to global problems, offering a unique perspective on gender issues today.
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Contemporary theoretical tools in the social sciences and humanities hinder an understanding of the dynamic interplay between reflexivity and routine in the formation of sex, gender, and sexual identities. In A Kaleidoscope of Identities, James W. Messerschmidt and Tristan Bridges build on the work of feminist sociologists in examining the relationship among situational interaction, accountability, and relational and discursive social structures to uniquely conceptualize sex, gender, and sexual practice as both reflexive and routine. Drawing on nuanced and powerful life-history interviews, Messerschmidt and Bridges present a new theoretical framework situating reflexivity and routine in a much more symbiotic relationship than has been previously acknowledged. Without privileging either, Messerschmidt and Bridges explore this relationship through a novel analysis of the ways reflexivity and routine collaboratively shape sex, gender, and sexual identities over time and across space. A Kaleidoscope of Identities provides a fresh, accessible, and provocative argument advancing our knowledge on the changing nature of sex, gender, and sexual identity formations alongside transforming systems of power and inequality.
Order at Rowman & Littlefield
Sociology NOW, third edition
This introduction to the field of sociology explains how the classic concerns of sociologists–social order, social conflict, social interaction–have been reshaped. Sociology has always offered a way to make sense of the complex and sometimes contradictory forces that shape our social lives in any era. As Sociology NOW, 3e explains, sociology is both a body of knowledge and a “way of seeing”-the sociological imagination. In this revision, Kimmel, Aronson, and Bridges offer a new framework for teaching the sociological imagination–a model they call “iSoc.” iSoc provides students with a new way of understanding the ways that sociologists look at the world with new up-to-date examples of cutting-edge scholarship offering a dynamic overview of the body of knowledge this field has produced. In the third edition, Sociology NOW will be available as a digital textbook (using Pearson’s REVEL platform) as well as in print. Digital readers will get additional insights from the authors in the form of video clips, video animations about key concepts, ideas, and findings, and an array of interactive maps, graphs, and visuals allowing students to interact with the material as they encounter it in the text.
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Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change is a comprehensive and contemporary reader for the growing field of men’s and masculinities studies. It takes a conceptual approach by covering the wide range of scholarship being done on masculinities beyond the model of hegemonic masculinity. C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges extend the boundaries of the field and provide a new framework for understanding masculinities studies. Rather than taking a topics-based approach to masculinity, Exploring Masculinities offers an innovative conceptual approach that enables students to study a given phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. It divides up the field in ways that provide accessible introductions to complex debates and key intra- and interdisciplinary distinctions. The book provides a portable set of conceptual tools on which scholars and students can rely to analyze masculinities in different contexts, time periods, and embodiments.
“…a vital contribution to gender scholarship as it opens up many new and different ways of thinking and talking about masculinity, while still leaving much to be explored.”
(Theordora H. Sakellarides, Lebanon Valley College)
“…the most in-depth and comprehensive treatment of masculinities around.”
(Freeden Oeur, Tufts University)
“It explicitly interrogates the fluidity of masculinities—how they transform over history, differ across contexts and groups, compel individuals and groups to navigate the nested systems of dominance underpinning ‘established’ gender practices, and how they are discursive and symbolic.”
(Edward H. Thompson, Jr., College of the Holy Cross)
- review the table of contents and overview here
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- purchase a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Oxford University Press, or Goodreads
Tristan Bridges 