Gender and Authority across Disciplines, Space and Time

This edited collection investigates the relationship between gender and authority across geographical contexts, periods and fields.

Who is recognized as a legitimate voice in debate and decision-making, and how is that legitimization produced? Through a variety of methodological approaches, the chapters address some of the most pressing and controversial themes under scrutiny in current feminist scholarship and activism, such as pornography, political representation, LGBTI struggles, female genital mutilation, the #MeToo movement, abortion, divorce and consent. Organized into three sections, “Politics,” “Law and Religion,” and “Imaginaries,” the contributors highlight formal and informal aspects of authority, its gendered and racialized configurations, and practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion by traditionally disempowered subjects. In dialogue with feminist scholarship on power and agency, the notion of authority as elaborated here offers a distinctive lens tocritique political and epistemic foundations of inequality and oppression, and will be of use to scholars and students across gender studies, sociology, politics, linguistics, theology, history, law, film, and literature.   

• Intersectionality
• women
• Institutional Power
• social representation
• Literature, Cinema and Theatre
• gender and politics
• sociology
• theology
• religion
• gender and authority network

“A book that strikes a blow at the heart of cis-hetero-patriarchal ideology. Challenging the view that outside the Law of the Father (who is always white, Western, and owner) there would be only chaos, authoritative voices in the feminist international debate respond not only through critique, but also by displaying alternative principles of authority. A subversive, empowering, necessary text.” — Lorenzo Bernini, Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, and Director of the Research Centre PoliTeSse, University of Verona, Italy

“An important and wide-ranging study of one the most pressing issues of our time and of all time – the systematic exclusion of female bodies and voices from structures of authority across cultures. The book issues a powerful call for us to resist and reframe authority, exploring the transformative potential offered by intersectional politics, knowledge-sharing, rewriting of history, resistant reading, and art.” — Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, and Director of the Oxford Life Writing Centre, University of Oxford, UK

“This book uses interdisciplinary approaches to a highly innovative set of discussions of gender and authority, most creatively and imaginatively. The book is effectively organised thematically, around politics, law and religion, and is truly diverse and multi-ethnic in its content, authorship and theoretical and methodological perspectives. This collection of essays provides an engaging, thought-provoking and genuinely innovative perspective of the ways in which gender and sexual politics intersect with and inform authority.” — Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK

• The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  Adele Bardazzi

• School of Modern Languages and Culture, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

  Alberica Bazzoni

Adele Bardazzi is Laming Research Fellow at Queen’s College, University of Oxford, UK.

Alberica Bazzoni is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK.  

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