Women's Studies Quarterly: Working Class Lives and Cultures, Vol. XXVI, #'s 1 and 2

by Lisa Orr (Editor), Renny Christopher (Editor), Linda J. Strom (Editor)

   This vital and engaging collection expands and builds upone Women's Studies Quarterly's groundbreaking 1995 volume, honored with an award from the Council of Editor's of Learned Journals. The poetry, testimony, analysis, history, and theory collected here, which includes works by Patti See and Janet Zandy, not only suggests connective threads for understanding working-class experiences and literatures but also explores intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Such explorations are arranged around the issue's four themes: family, education, the workplace, and identity. From South African sexual relationships, to teaching Medieval studies to working-class students, to the politics of a deaf workers' publication, to poems written in prison, this issue testifies to the growing depth and scope of working-class studies. Essential reading for all interested in the field, this issue offers an anvaluable framework for discussing working-class literature, culture, and artistic production, while also attending to the material conditions of working class peoples' lives.

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1998

About the author

Lisa Orr (www.facebook.com/LisaOrrWrites) has published memoir, book reviews, works of literary criticism, and news stories. Her scholarly essays have appeared in the journals American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Race, Gender and Class, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Jeunesse. In 2007, her book Transforming American Realism: Working-Class Women Writers of the Twentieth Century came out from University Press of America. She has edited three anthologies on controversial topics for Greenhaven Press, and co-edited a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, focused on working-class women. As a freelance journalist she wrote features for the Syracuse (N.Y.) New Times, and covered the 1988 New Hampshire primary. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has taught writing, both creative and nonfiction, for 20 years. Her historical novel, The Adventuress, is represented by Joyce Holland of the D4EO Literary Agency.