Recommended reading list #1

Two recommendations from our peers:

1.  At our group meeting toward the end of Michaelmas term this year, Maria recommended a book she requires all of her first-year students: The Myth of Mars and Venus, by Oxford professor Deborah Cameron.  Here is an extended excerpt published in the Guardian and here is a review of it in the Times.  If I recall correctly, Maria uses it to get her students thinking about the gendered uses of rhetoric and linguistics.  Seems like this would apply to a lot of our questions about gender, the media, power, stereotypes, etc... If anyone has read or does read it, please let us know what you think.

2.  Dara recommended this second book: Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy.  I read it last weekend and it made me think a lot (the Oxford Public Library has a copy for those who are interested).  Comparated to dense academic papers, it's a quick read -- journalistic in style.  This book focuses particularly on how a subset of women are choosing to access power and it asks if the particular (sexual) power they're accessing is truly power.  Can it (the power) be used to leverage change, and if not, what's the point?  

Here is an excerpt from the introduction and here are two reviews-- the NYTimes review is more favorable, the Alternet less so. 

I hope this is just the beginning of a big list of reading recommendations!  :-)

Articles, books, etc... anything is fair game.  Either add it in the comments or start a new post.  I think we'll also try to get the discussion leaders who run a couple of the brown-bag sessions next term to send around a few optional articles for us to read before their presentations.