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This book considers key personal, political and pedagogical approaches to trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex people in various policy fields such as sex/gender recognition legislation, medical diagnoses, medical interventions and educational policies. The book also contemplates how self-determination relates to sex/gender, transitions and expressions, and how it corresponds to current debates around binary sex/gender embodiment. The relevant human and non-human qualities that are addressed throughout the book are not analyzed in relation to someone’s or something’s inherent nature but demonstrated to be desired and then produced in specific assemblages. These assemblages of becoming-human and becoming-social are constituted by looking to the immediate pasts, present contexts, and potential future directions of being able to self-determine sex/gender within the different policy domains. The book then is a commentary on ethical relationships. My approach to sex/gender self-determination shows how a variety of human and non-human forces are enrolled in moralizing and thus denigrating the promotion of ethical frameworks that impact inequitably on trans, sex/gender expansive, intersex people and cis people. The book suggests that any truly ethical policy and engagement with it must acknowledge these relationships through a ‘nomadic ethics’ framework. Drawing on the Deleuzian concepts of assemblage, affect and desire this book takes you on a journey of interconnected trajectories of human and non-human bodies and personal, political and pedagogical policies.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and how they construct and negotiate masculinities in everyday lives. Drawing from empirical research, it uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores masculinity within intimacy and kinship. The book proposes and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently depending on the context. At the same time, the men’s masculinity formation is constrained by the availability of resources, structural constraints, cultural traditions and diverse personal relationships. The book showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. By doing so, it prioritizes local knowledge while setting the scene in a global framework. The book provides a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and a timely study of how ordinary men actively engage with China’s global modernity, increasing individualisation, shifting gender values and changing local realities.

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, the author of this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state's legitimization of austerity and women's everyday experiences, the book reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, the book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity. Delivering a timely account of the misconceptions of policies, discourses and representations around austerity in the UK, the book illustrates the complex ways through which austerity is experienced by women in their everyday lives.

The feeding of human milk to socially and biologically unrelated infants is not a new phenomenon, but the Euroamerican values of individualism have generated expectations that mothers are individually responsible for feeding their own infants. Using a bio-communities of practice framework, this dynamic new analysis explores the emotional and material dimensions of the growing milk-sharing practice in the Global North and its implications for contemporary understandings of infant feeding in the United States. Ranging widely across themes of motherhood, gender and sociology, this is a compelling empirical account of infant feeding that stimulates new thinking about a contentious practice.

Efforts to prevent sexual violence against women and children can be evidenced by many local, national, global initiatives. In 2016, the World Health Organisation published its Global Plan of Action to address violence against women and children. The strategy called for a global and nationwide public health multisectoral response to preventing violence. This collection aims to respond to this call by examining academic and practitioner perspectives of current approaches that claim to respond to both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence in preventing future violence. Contributors across this collection, critically examine contemporary policy and practice, highlighting existing gaps in our knowledge, problems in policy and service delivery; as well as recommending possibilities and future solutions that might begin to address some of the challenges faced by stakeholders in this field.

Methodologically innovative in its use of mixed-media diary research, this timely book offers a focused sociological study of non-binary people’s identities and experiences in the UK. From negotiating a sense of legitimacy when ‘not feeling trans enough’ to how identities can shift over time, it reveals important nuances of diverse gender identities while offering crucial insights into trans-related healthcare inequalities. The findings of this ground-breaking research mark an important contribution to the wider fields of gender studies, LGBTQ scholarship and medical policy.

The book provides a systematic scientific overview of gender mainstreaming in Europe. It recalls the main steps of the origins and the development of the European gender mainstreaming (GM) strategy. The book also connects this framework with the current situation of gender equality and explores the strength and weak points of the strategy. To do so, it provides a critical evaluation of the instruments used to measure gender equality and explores how societal aspects, such as the opportunity structure defined by work-family balance policies and practices, affect the individual values of gender equality supporting the development of gender egalitarian cultures. Further, it develops an outline of the current and future challenges of the gender mainstreaming strategy, that run in parallel with the general European Union’s challenges, such as the integration process, economic crisis, migration and refugees crisis, and the rise of right-wing Euroscepticism. In addition, the old but always current problem of conceptualizing gender equality in different ways leading to jeopardized results. The book offers a critical review of the GM strategy in Europe and analyses whether and how gender equality in Europe is improving, with a specific interest in the cultural differences between the European countries where this common strategy is implemented.

The outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but little research has considered the experiences of local White British women working as independent cleaning service-providers.Domestic work in India is increasingly researched but mostly with a regional focus. Through a nuanced cross-cultural analysis of outsourced domestic cleaning in a particular social context in the UK and India, this book provides a fresh perspective on domestic work: that outsourced domestic cleaning can be done as work (using mental and manual skills and labour) or as labour (understood as requiring mainly manual labour accompanied by ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour), depending on the work conditions. The book challenges feminist dogma and popular myths about housework.

This book is a socio-historical analysis of the relationship between women, politics and the public sphere. It looks at the legacy of eighteenth-century intellectual groupings which were dominated by women such as members of the ‘bluestocking circles’ and other more radical intellectual and philosophical thinkers such as Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. These individuals and groups which emerged in the eighteenth century established ‘intellectual spaces’ for the emergence of women public intellectuals in subsequent centuries. Women public intellectuals in the US examined in the book include Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Warren, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Sheryl Sandberg. The implications for the political representation of women in the West and globally is considered, highlighting how women public intellectuals now reflect much more social and cultural diversity. The book is about the fault-lines established in the eighteenth century for later developments in social and political discourse.

Gender is a factor of youth migration; it shapes the roles, capacities, access to resources, and cultural expectations in society. Gender defines who leaves and who stays behind in the place of origin, or the extent from which the youth travels outside of their own communities. This collection is possibly the first to present the intersection of gender and youth migration with encompassing themes related to imperial histories, negotiating identities, education, and work using diverse studies in Canada, France, Hungary, Bangladesh, Turkey, Italy, Albania, Ethiopia, U.K. and the U.S. Gendered modalities suggest that there are particular ways or modes in which gender as a system of power relations become manifest in youth migration, either voluntarily or coerced, and consequently, their negotiation of structures and limiting social practices.Gender and youth are intrinsically connected to migration, and this book is about these connections in multidisciplinary perspectives in an increasingly globalized world.