SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies

By elevating trans voices and experiences, this book offers a new perspective on transness, medicalization and research methodologies to help trans people, practitioners and policy makers better understand the barriers faced by trans people when seeking healthcare.

What kinds of care are being offered or withdrawn by the welfare state? What does this mean for the caring practices and interventions of local activists? Shedding new light on austerity and neoliberal welfare reform in the UK, this vital book considers local action and activism within contexts of crisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book explores the experiences of people affected by Ireland's constitutional abortion ban. Through in-depth research and interviews, the author uncovers how the 8th Amendment led women and gestating people live their bodies as "future aborting bodies," and how the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies shaped everyday practices.

This book uses affect theory to explore how placed surroundings shape experiences of gender. Drawing on debates in sociology, geography and organization studies, it examines what it means to be ‘in’ or ‘out’ of place and analyses how gender shapes meanings, attachments and identities relating to place.

This book challenges Western-centric views on sex in later life by exploring diverse cultures from the majority world. It advocates learning from overlooked perspectives and dismantling stereotypes about their sexual conservatism. It critiques cultural binaries, emphasising the need to decentre Western perspectives as the benchmark.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong, China, this book explores the various tactics queer people employ to have children and to form queer or ‘rainbow’ families. It unpacks people’s experiences of cultivating, or losing, kinship relations through their negotiation with biological relatives, cultural conventions and state legislations.

Drawing on the words and stories of queer Turkish activists, this book aims to unravel the complexities of queer lives in Turkey. In doing so, it challenges dominant conceptualizations of the queer Turkish experience within critical security discourses.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently in response to personal relationships and local realities.

This compelling book examines parental leave policies in Nordic countries, looking at how these laws encourage men towards life courses with greater care responsibilities. It considers the impact that these policies have had on gender equality and how they have led to a re-gendering of men by promoting ‘caring masculinities’.

This book looks at political attempts to create a 'modern family' and the aspiration to regulate the family and establish gender equality, examining the regulation of the family in Sweden between 1930 and today.

Addressing urgent challenges and debates in trans health, this book interweaves patient voices with social theory and autobiography, offering an innovative look at how shifting language, patient mistrust, waiting lists and professional power shape clinical encounters, and exploring what a better future might look like for trans patients.

Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process, telling how a research project on caring and social support is undertaken. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.