About the Book
Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global highlights the problems facing women around the world by featuring papers that explore women's activism across borders regarding gender and human rights, issues regarding women and poverty, globalization, economic value of immigrant labor, militarism and human trafficking. Also discussed are the opportunities and obstacles women face when they act to counter the negative impact of these forces. This anthology is a collection of essays by feminist scholars and students who examine discourses on border crossings, political and cultural censorship, gendered codes of conduct, prescribed behavior for women and the activism that emerges to address identity formation, to advance contested meanings and to build coalitions. Throughout the essays, the authors investigate the concepts of the gendered body in the context of global activism, the uses of women's bodies in domestic, military, and sexual service, and the breaching of the body's borders and boundaries in the project of feminist social change.
About the Author :
Judy Hayden, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Writing and Director of Women's Studies at the University of Tampa. Her journal essays appear in Women's History Magazine, English, Papers on Language and Literature, Critical Survey, and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. Her book on Aphra Behn is forthcoming.Sharon Kay Masters, Ph.D., is Professor and Coordinator of Sociology and Director of Women's Studies at Florida Southern College. She co-edited Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Women's Studies, a textbook for Florida Southern courses, and the Florida Consortium for Women's and Gender Studies' first anthology, Many Floridas: Women Envisioning Change.Kim Vaz, Ph.D. and LMHC, is Associate Professor and Chair of Women's Studies at the University of South Florida. Her books include The woman with the artistic brush: A life history of Yoruba batik artist, Nike Davies; Black Women in America; Oral Narrative Research with Black Women; and Benefiting by Design: A Feminist Psychology of Women of Color (forthcoming).
Review :
''Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global exemplifies an intersection of the call to 'Think globally, act locally' with the feminist claim that 'the personal is political.' This is an engaging and provocative collection that will appeal well beyond the borders of 'Florida' itself—that identity-challenged border state. These essays range widely across geographic regions and transdisciplinary territories—from Tampa and Miami to India and Canada, from the politics of hair-straightening and the 'big butt' to that of the Abu Ghraib photographs, from poetry-interspersed reflection on the 'internalized' globalness of mixed race identity(s) to the political possibilities of a trans-national ethics of care and the economics of women's labor-practices, from theorizing the Enlightenment heritage of 'human rights' to embodied art-making. Tied together by their timeliness and their concern to link the imminently local or personal with the explicitly global or relational, these essays interact in provocative and innovative ways. This collection will be useful both for interdisciplinary and for traditional disciplinary efforts to engage with and reframe conventional ideas about nationalism and terrorism, raced and gendered identities, feminist art and economics, women's rights as human rights, and the challenges of multiculturalism across national boundaries. There is something for everyone in this collection, with surprising and enlightening connections in each essay that repay the adventurous reader." Miriam L. Wallace, Ph.D., Associate Professor, British & American Literature Coordinator, Program in Gender Studies 2003-06 New College of Florida"Florida Without Borders: Women at the Intersection of the Local and Global is a significant contribution to scholarship on gender and globalization. Published by the Florida Consortium of Women's and Gender Studies, this engaging work contains articles by scholars, activists, and artists who demonstrate how the issues and concerns regarding Florida are simultaneously global concerns. The authors provide an impressive international, multicultural approach to a feminist ethics of care, ecofeminism, the war on terror and torture as seen through the lens of gender, female trafficking, the globalized female body, economic empowerment, and women in fashion and the arts. The essays are groundbreaking and provocative.''- Carolyn Ross Johnston, PhD, Professor of History and American Studies, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, Eckerd College'Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global is a unique approach that truly integrates the local and the global, as promised in the title. Local issues are clearly a microcosm of larger societal issues. A wide variety of topics are viewed with attention to race, class and gender, giving voice to the feminisms that help define what "feminism" is today. The need for change is apparent in the writings of this anthology. It would be hard to imagine reading this book without recognizing the need for change and feeling a call to action in both a personal and political context. '- Joyce L. Carbonell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Director of the Women's Studies Program, Florida State University ''The first section seeks to expand application of feminist concepts, frameworks, and paradigms; the second focuses on the (ab)uses of gender within the military; the third examines intersections of physical female bodies and culturally restrictive norms within the United States and abroad; and the fourth primarily discusses the work of women visual and performance artists with feminist agendas. [...] The collection of short treatises in Florida without Borders provides high-interest materials to stimulate discussion in introductory women's studies courses. It could be used as a preliminary text, but should be followed by more in-depth treatment of feminist issues.''- Bonnie L. Mitchell-Green. Feminist Teacher, 22:1 (2013), 78-80.
