MINEKE SCHIPPER

En todas culruras, las cuestiones relacionadas con el sexo y el género han sido expresadas en proverbios, el género literario más conciso, normativo y conservador de una sociedad, cuyas fuentes a menudo son orales y anonimas. De ahi una de las grandes dificultades a las se enfrento la autora durante su labor de investigacion.

In Japanese, the word for widow a woman who has outlived her husband literally translates as she who has not yet died. For millennia, widows have lived on the margins of society: banished to the wilderness, silenced, and shrouded in black or white. Across cultures, laws and local customs have maligned them as witches, dependants or objects of pity.In some traditions, widows are expected to remarry within the husbands family, or even in extreme cases commit self-immolation expectations not placed on men. Yet widowhood has also brought unexpected freedoms: financial, social and sexual autonomy denied to married women. In medieval Europe, widows owned property and ran businesses; in Indias Maratha courts, they wielded political influence long before married women could.Drawing on sources from Ancient Egypt and Greece to Africa, the Americas and beyond, cultural historian Mineke Schipper explores widowhood as both oppression and liberation. Widows reveals one of feminisms last great taboos, and the story of women the world has long refused to see.

For centuries, wild and strange stories have been told about the female body. Some empowering, many absurd, these myths have not only endured but continue to shape perceptions of women today.The Shrinking Goddess explores this legacy, gathering global tales about the female form and revealing how and why generations of men have sought to interpret, control and tame women. Mineke Schipper investigates the disappearance of the original creation figure, Mother Earth, from mainstream culture, and how womens bodies have been imagined ever since: from the demon daughter of New Mexico with a toothed vagina, to the Japanese supermarkets and European festivals offering breast puddings as delicacies.Drawing on an extraordinary archive of art, literature and folklore, Schipper reclaims the female body as a place of power, creativity and possibility.