Prior to the 1980s, numerous charges of discrimination were noteworthy among women in Hollywood. In those years, women were in uncertain situations, so they seemed aimless and vulnerable. In the period that this article focuses on, the female characters are or have become intelligent and therefore open-minded and potentially independent. Although, they are still vulnerable and unsure of themsel...

All books, including Donald G. Dutton’s (2006) Rethinking Domestic Violence, are written and published in a specific political and economic context. As vividly described by Faludi (1991), Hammer (2002), and many others who made progressive contributions to an interdisciplinary understanding of the enduring discrimination against contemporary North American women, we still live in a climate char...

Feminist legal theory provides a healthy skepticism toward legal doctrine and insists that we reexamine even formally gender-neutral rules to uncover problematic assumptions behind them. The article first outlines feminist legal theory from the perspectives of liberal, cultural, and radical feminism. Examples of how each theory influences legal practice, case law, and legislation are highlighte...

In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) within American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), I consider the reificat...

I comment on Eagly and Wood's biosocial constructionist evolutionary theory (2011; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-011-9949-9). Although this gender feminist theory allows for evolved physical differences between men and women and evolved psychological similarities for men and women, it fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. I hypothesize that gender feminists' reluctance...

The current study examined how feminism relates to women’s experiences of sexual harassment—that is, unwanted sexual and sexist conduct in the workplace. We posited that feminism would have both costs (e.g., increasing exposure to harassment) and benefits (e.g., decreasing harassment-related outcomes). We assessed two indicators of feminism: selfidentification as ‘‘feminist’’ and engagement in ...

In this article, we apply three theoretical frameworks, poststructural feminism, queer, and sociology of gender to the issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in order to better account for heterosexual female perpetration and same-sex IPV. Although the traditional feminist paradigm—that assumes men use violence as an extension of patriarchy against their female victims—has been useful in expl...