Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement

by Ann Russo

Overview

In this groundbreaking book, outspoken feminist Ann Russo offers a call to action to the feminist movement to truly become the inclusive, progressive, and supportive group that it claims to be. Russo challenges feminists to address lesbian battering, the social implications of lesbian pornography, as well as racism and white privilege in feminist theories and politics. Herself a survivor of sexual assault, Russo argues that if we want the violence against women to end, we must address the issues with honesty and clarity. This is an eye-opening, unflinching look at the women's movement and the violence done to women every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135958244
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/01/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	359 KB

About the Author

Ann Russo is Professor of Women's Studies at DePaul University. She has written for Sojourner and Women's Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Dedication Acknowledgements Part I: Transforming Feminist Theorizing 1. If Not Now, When? Contemporary Feminist Movement to End Violence against Women 2. Lesbians, Prostitutes, Media, and Murder: The Violence Against Women and the Violence Women Commit 3. Lesbian and Bisexual Women's Battering: Homophobia, Heterosexism and Violence Part II: Truthtelling 4. Pornography's Stories: Eroticizing Inequality, Hierarchy, and Historical Atrocity 5. Lesbian Porn Stories: Rebellion or Resistance? 6. Sexual Conflicts and Contradictions: Violence, Desire, Autonomy, Freedom Part III: Interlocking Oppressions 7. Violence By Any Name: A Battered Lesbian Fights for Recognition 8. White Men Can't Kill: Racial Coding of Men's Intimate Violence Against Women 9. Taking Back Our Lives: Expanding Campus Efforts to End Sexual Violence Part IV: Transforming Feminist Resistance 10. The Struggle for Integrity in an Unjust World: Telling Our Stories 11. On Becoming an Antiracist Feminist: Strategies to Recognize and Disrupt White Privilege and Power

Editorial Reviews

"...this book is a welcome addition to feminist knowledge...the book is interesting, well written, and provative...Russo's line of questioning is fascinating and intoxicating and could act as a double-edged sword...As a whole, the issues that emerge from Russo's approach are challenging, enlightening, fresh, and appealing." — Contemporary Sociology
"Russo addresses feminist theory, violence against women, pornography, the media, racial profiling, sexual conflict and contradiction, the importance of telling stories of resistance as well as victimization, and strategies for a 'a feminist practice of antiracism.' Penetrating, challenging essays." — Booklist
"A compelling combination of public and personal examples and analysis of violence against women that challenges taken-for-granted frameworks and perspectives. This book deeply touched my sensibilities as a survivor of violence and a feminist anti-violence activist." — Margo Okazawa-Rey, co-editor of Women's Lives
"[A]n illuminating and innovative analysis of feminist strategies for organizing against the violence that is so often a daily part of women's lives..Russo challenges, expands, and transforms feminist work against violence. Russo contributes a powerful and eloquent voice to the ongoing work for justice for all women. Taking Back Our Lives will re-energize and mobilize the feminist movement, as well as all others committed to the struggle to abolish violence against women." — Lourdes Torres, co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism
"Ann Russo is one of those rare writers who reveals very hard things and poses really tough questions in a way that is so candid and so direct that we, her readers, don't turn away from those realities but pursue, with her, the answers. This is a radical feminist analysis of violence; radical in the true sense of going to the very core of what causes violence against women in all their diversity. I was moved by Ann Russo's book-and energized." — Cynthia Enloe, author of The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives
"Eloquent and honest..Russo voices the dismay and frustration many of us feel when we confront women's violence, but she also instills hope by challenging the feminist movement to own this problem, thus moving us forward toward workable r tinist solutions." — Claire M. Renzetti, co-editor of The Sourcebook on Violence Against Women
"Any work that provokes serious thought, as this one does, is worthy of serious attention." — Women's Review of Books, December 2001
"Penetrating, challenging essays." — Booklist, July 2001

From the Publisher