This publication examines the ways in which women in differing national and social contexts negotiated the cultural terrain of emergent modernity. The volume presents essays on women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation.
Taking the intellectual and political legacies of Edward Said as a point of departure and frame of reference, the contributors consider the current condition of humanism and the humanities. Said's definition of the core task of the humanities as the pursuit of democratic criticism remains more urgent than ever, though it needs to be supplemented by gender, environmental, and anti-racist perspectives as well as by detailed analysis of the necro-political governmentality of our time.