New gender studies textbook is out, and it’s everything a bleeding heart liberal could hope for

New gender studies textbook is out, and it’s everything a bleeding heart liberal could hope for

In the modern era, it’s not enough merely to champion causes you believe in. You also need to beat into submission — or to death — those who challenge your beliefs, no matter how compelling their counterarguments might be.

Take as a case in point a new college-level gender studies textbook. The book about a self-identified man having a baby and how burkas can be liberating. But it also takes aim at age-old traditions, vilifying white weddings are nothing more than assembly lines of sexual hierarchy.

Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies,” written by Ann Braithwaite and Beloit Professor Catherine M. Orr, who teach respectively at the University of Prince Edward Island and Beloit College. The book promises to offer “instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women’s and gender studies.”

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“There are many ways to go about acquiring what they call ‘a beer belly.’ I chose pregnancy,” declares self-identified man J Wallace in a section of the work titled, “The Manly Art of Pregnancy.” In it, Wallace asserts that most books assume pregnancy is reserved solely for women and laments that books for pregnant men are hard to find. “Before I was pregnant, I feared that pregnancy would make me into a woman or a lady. But it didn’t; it made me more of a dude,” writes Wallace.

Wallace credits her (his?) manliness to more hair growth encouraged by pregnancy and the loss of her period. “A pregnant body does not make him as either feminine or woman, but rather produces new possibilities for masculine embodiment,” the text reads.

The book also explains that the “contemporary white wedding under multinational capitalism is, in effect, a mass-marketed, homogeneous, assembly-line production,” while maintaining that “[b]urqas are a ‘liberating invention’:

Everywhere, such veiling signifies belonging to a particular community and participating in a moral way of life in which families are paramount in the organization of communities and the home is associated with the sanctity of women.

Much of the book comes off more as an op-ed than it does a comprehensive approach to the subject matter. Here are the authors on Viagra:

The Viagra phenomenon reinforces and hardens the coital imperative … and “is profoundly disappointing.” The “co-option of the coital imperative” deprives men and women of “reproductive choices that might have enhanced their health and well-being” and restrictively “close[s] down other legitimate possibilities for sexuality.”

Many universities will use the text for the 2018 academic year. It’s a “game changer for teaching women’s and gender studies undergraduates,” UNC’s Michele Tracy Berger wrote in a review.

It “reinvents the introductory textbook form to reflect the field’s intersectional commitments,” wrote Robyn Wiegman of Duke University.

The text provides an “accessible, down-to-earth, yet still theoretically sophisticated guide to the ever-changing field of women’s and gender studies” and “provides a welcome and innovative introduction to the twisted and all-too-everpresent ways in which gender exerts itself on our bodies, our minds, our ideas, our identities,” wrote Northeastern University’s Suzanna Walters.

Routledge, the book’s publisher, did not respond in time to TheDCNF’s request for a list of universities and colleges that will use this text in the approaching academic year.

This report, by Grace Carr, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

LU Staff

LU Staff

Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.

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