Mary F. Rogers

In Who's Afraid of Women's Studies? the authors ask why there persists a fear of feminism and women's studies in the academy. Rogers and Garrett remind us that this field came into being as the result of women's practical efforts of advocacy and activism, to represent marginalized, excluded, and silenced voices. They explain the complex relationship between feminism, women's studies, and their deradicalized 'offspring'—gender studies. Six broad topics that have dominated the field over the past twenty-five years are examined in individual chapters: girls' and women's bodies, anger and desires, sexuality, identity politics, insider backlash, and feminist methods. The authors challenge women and men alike to reevaluate the concepts and analytical tools available in women's studies that are so uniquely oriented to understanding women's everyday lived experiences. They demonstrate how its rich historical and social analyses are the basis for a passionate scholarship, one that builds bridges between theory and practice to transform communities, women's organizations, and social movements. This new book will be a stimulating overview of women's studies, gender studies, and feminist theory, as well as a concise introduction to supplement standard texts or anthologies.

This book uses one of the most popular accessories of childhood, the Barbie doll, to explain key aspects of cultural meaning. Some readings would see Barbie as reproducing ethnicity and gender in a particularly coarse and damaging way - a cultural icon of racism and sexism. Rogers develops a broader, more challenging picture. She shows how the cultural meaning of Barbie is more ambiguous than the narrow, appearance-dominated model that is attributed to the doll. For a start, Barbie's sexual identity is not clear-cut. Similarly her class situation is ambiguous. But all interpretations agree that, with her enormous range of lifestyle `accessories', Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, standardized and oozing fake sincerity.

Focusing on British and American novels, Rogers takes a sociological look at the business of literature, the book industry, and the experiences of novelists and readers. Viewing the novel as a vehicle of cultural meaning, the author shows how the literary canon overlooks substantial similarities among novels in favor of restrictive codes based on social as well as literary considerations. She emphasizes the kinship between the social sciences and humanities in her analysis, by reinvigorating affection for the novel and also establishing its rich cultural significance.

In this volume, first published in 1983, Professor Rogers examines the usefulness of a phenomenological approach to sociology. Her broad purpose is to demonstrate the theoretical and methodological advantages phenomenological sociology holds. Thus she offers a selective, introductory exposition of phenomenology, highlighting its relevance for social scientists and undercutting the notion of phenomenology as a non-scientific, subjective, or esoteric method of study.