Book Description
Sometimes I fantasize about having a magic wand. How awesome it would be to wave it and completely eliminate prejudice, hate, and ignorance. Just imagine what it would be like to live in a world like that.
How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent: A Book by Kids for Kids of All Ages gives voice to the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of children, adolescents, and young adults who have a gay or lesbian parent. In their own words, they talk openly and candidly about how and when they learned of their parent's sexual orientation and the effect it had on them—and their families. Their stories echo themes of prejudice and harassment, conflict and confusion, adaptation and adjustment, and hope for tolerance and a family that can exist in harmony.
"Because it's an issue for other people, it becomes an issue for me. I'm angry about the way it works against me."
The stories told in How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent not only reflect the day-to-day struggle of children with a GLBT parent, they also reveal the pain inherent in high-conflict divorce and child custody cases. Children of gay/lesbian parents ranging in age from seven to 31 recall the confusion and grief created when the disclosure of their parent's true sexual orientation ended a marriage and divided a family. The "straight" parent's resentment can lead to angry remarks that—intentionally or unintentionally—disparage the gay/lesbian parent and threaten the natural love and affection the child feels for both.
"I guess the hardest part about having a gay dad is that no matter how okay you are with it, there's always going to be someone who will dislike you because of it."
The one-on-one interviews presented in How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent document first-hand the effects of homophobia on family life. Children struggle with the choice between living in a closet, shamed by peers and family members, or dealing with discrimination as a parent's sexual orientation is used against them. Taken together, these stories make a statement for acceptance, understanding, and tolerance as children do their best to make the transition from a traditional family to a nontraditional lifestyle.
"My mom is a normal person just like everyone else. The only thing that's different about her is that she's gay and if you can't deal with it, you're just going to have to live with it."
How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent: A Book by Kids for Kids of All Ages offers comfort and support to children from those who share their journey. The book is a valuable aid for practitioners working with children of GLBT parents and an educational tool for GLBT adults considering children.
Customer Reviews:
Poor collection of testimonies.......2007-04-12
I was most dissapointed with this collection of stories by kids ranging 7-20+. I had seen something similar before (with similar results). It does not claim to be anymore than it is, but still it leaves you begging for something more apart from stories that, whilst interesting, are hard to evaluate without a context, or the view from the "other side", a wider look at their lives to contextualise, and why not, learn.
Good for older kids.......2007-01-04
I bought this book thinking it would be good for my daughter and my partner's daughter. It has some good writing, but definitely get this for an older teen. The stories weren't really coming from kids my daughter's age (10), so they were harder to relate to for her. Perhaps in a couple years she'll pick it up and give it another try.
I love the premise of this book...and I'd like to see something just like it but written from younger kids' perspectives.
Quite Disturbed that this come up under Mentally Ill Parents.......2006-08-19
I've never read this book, but I'm very disturbed that it came up under a search of mentally ill parents. I think amazon should be ASHAMED to have classified homosexuality as a mental illness. I am SHOCKED!
It's about time!.......2006-08-04
I loved this book. I found that it's something so new over the past few years, as far as something that people talk about. We've come so far relative to diversity, acceptance, and sharing our personal stories, that a book like this is a breath of fresh air. I'm happy that it talks about things from a child's perspective, and doesn't try to be too clinical or matter-of-fact. My children loved the book (they're teens....and I'm a gay dad) and it put all of the challenges, blessings, and difficulties into perspective for them. We're all walking a different path, and it's great to see what others (and their children have gone through.
almost child friendly.......2006-03-10
i found the book a good read, but my young daughter has a little trouble with the words not being literacy friendly. she has trouble with adult words (the spelling). otherwise i enjoyed it.
Book Description
In this engrossing and original book, Leslie Salzinger takes us with her into the gendered world of Mexico's global factories. Her careful ethnographic work, personal voice, and sophisticated analysis capture the feel of life inside the maquiladoras and make a compelling case that transnational production is a gendered process. The research grounds contemporary feminist theory in an examination of daily practices and provides an important new perspective on globalization.
Customer Reviews:
The exploitation of gender for profit.......2005-06-25
"Genders in Production" by Leslie Salzinger is a groundbreaking study about production processes in Mexico's maquiladoras. This fascinating book should appeal to academics, feminists, labor activists and others who may be interested in learning about the dynamic processes by which globalization exploits gender for profit. Importantly, Ms. Salzinger's keen insight and analysis helps open the door to imagining a world where gender stereotypes could be transcended and labor rights accorded more respect.
Ms. Salzinger's meticulous ethnographic work at four maquila factories helps her obtain an insider's view of how sexual identities struggle for recognition and reward on the shop floor. The author discusses how the "trope of feminity" deludes investors into locating factories in places where it is believed that female laborers will passively accept routinized work for low wages. However, as the facts on the ground depart from this fantasy, the struggle between capital and labor is observed to be gendered but nonetheless highly variable and contextual.
Ms. Salzinger dedicates one chapter apiece to her experiences at four manufacturing plants in northern Mexico. She cleverly assigns pseudonyms to describe the salient characteristics of each plant. For example, "Andromex" is a factory where male and female workers become almost androgenous through the development of similar work habits; "Anarchomex" is noteworthy for its embattled masculine workers conflicting both amongst themselves and with female co-workers to create nearly anarchic conditions of production; and so on. The writing in these chapters is vivid, engaging and intelligent, imparting glimpses into both the worker's daily struggle for survival and the logic of the managerial systems that controls and exploits these workers.
I found it interesting (if not disheartening) to learn that capital's strategy of dividing the working class by gender has proven to be remarkably effective. By redefining production as primarily women's work, employers can pay below-subsistance wages and offer scant benefits, job enrichment or advancement opportunities. As made clear through Ms. Salzinger's field research, these diminished career expectations deprive the working class of Mexico with the hope of achieving a better life and are frequently used as a threat to drive down wages in the U.S. and other industrialized nations.
In the final chapter, Ms. Salzinger draws on feminist writings to connect the trope of feminity with cultural norms that tend to devalue women through their association with domesticity. By discovering that gendered meanings in the workplace can be flexible, however, the author suggests that subjectivity may be contestable. If structures of power are a "concatenation of common-sense understandings" about women's perceived role in the home, she argues, then the reality of changed meanings forged in the crucible of workplace production may point the way in time to new, empowered definitions.
I highly recommend this book to demanding readers who may be interested in an original and thought-provoking thesis about gender and globalization.
Book Description
As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family.
Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic painsâsuch as backaches and headachesâthat many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.
Customer Reviews:
Treat workers as human beings for better results.......2006-10-30
Anyone working on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), with NGOs, or otherwise on development issues in China and most developing countries should read this book. I only wish Pung Nai had a shorter version where she cut out all the intellectual references to supposed `great thinkers' of the past century and actually kept it to its GEMS, which are her own insights into the true life realities for women factory workers.
This book came from Pung Nais PhD as she tells us. This is unfortunate as it makes what is otherwise fantastic material hard to read and slow. But the well written sections tell us stories of individual workers odysseys to Shenzhen from far away provinces, and explain social issues in China, and factory language providing insights few other writers have provided.
To those working on improving factory conditions, there are a lot of great tips here about what Not to do. Pung Nai talks about worker slowdowns due to frustration at dogmatic authoritarian pressure to work faster, or have music turned off, etc, and of workers being less efficient and regularly fainting from working excessive overtime. Reading this book gives those of us working to encourage factory managers to give their workers more reasonable hours and wages, more force in our argument that doing so will improve productivity and quality.
Regardless, Pung Nai points out the terrible toll on peoples lives of excessive overtime, particularly the physical and psychological impacts on young women, who are not only burdened by the work pressure, but also familial pressures back home to marry and have sons. It helps us understand the value of programmes such as Nikes high school graduation programme for factory workers in Asia, to give workers a chance to gain self respect and pride in an environment in which the very essence of who they are, country girls, is looked down upon.
Marxist retoric in disguise.......2006-06-16
By in large, to explain this book, "Made in China" by Pun Ngai, I have to look first at several different issues: the politics behind it, the assumptions they draw upon, and the things she leaves out. First off let me go into the politics behind this book. The more and more I read this book, the more and more I hate it. I'm sorry for saying that--well, not really. Maybe Pun Ngai has good intentions by pointing out only the negatives in every instance, but I couldn't help but be reminded of some transient theme behind all of her pessimisms. If I didn't know any better, which I obviously don't, I would say that Pun Ngai was defaming China not for being against the US and world cohesion, but for being for it. By that, I mean, that this book is extremely Marxist, anti capitalist, and anti US--to stand behind this book, while still maintaining any sense of American patriotism or pride is contradictory. This response may seem to be merely a defensive stance in terms of capitalism versus Marxist communism, but I'd like to think that it's more than that. The type of thought from this book isn't rare in China, Pun Ngai is only a part of a widely criticizing faction growing within China that likes to point out all the negatives of globalization, free trade, or neo-liberalism by pointing out the exploits and the harsh conditions being subjugated upon the workers, while disregarding any and all positive benefits they receive personally as well as any benefits towards the government as a whole. In this way, it is kind of like focusing in on only one part of a government's policies, focusing in on only one company still undergoing reform in the face of a more global privatized free trade open market economy, focusing in on only the lower echeloned workers most of whom are uneducated towards global perspectives, and focusing in on only the negative aspects of their lives. It is in this way that Pun Ngai was able to write such a completely negatively slanted defamation to all logical and true global debate. When the benefits of a society's system out weigh the negatives, in order to make a Marxist argument for conflict, one has to actually dig down to the bottom of the barrel and scrape the conflicts out with a spoon. The term "spoon" I am using is a metaphor for the subtle way Pun Ngai is trying to prove her points. It was written to incite outrage and to depict a sense of rebellion or resistance, which may or may not have actually been there, just to further her own party or social group's political ideologies. However, though, in the face of actual research and more information, for lack of a better way of putting this, Pun Ngai is just digging up dirt. This book was not written to discuss whether globalization is ultimately more or less beneficial to society, it was written to persuade people in how globalization is only negative.
Book Description
In this up-close and personal look at the heroines who make family, community, and society tick, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie showcases immigrant women workers speaking out for themselves, in their own words. While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity, this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading campaigns to fight for their rights.
In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies, which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly paid jobs, dovetail with vivid portraits of the women themselves. Louie, a longtime writer/activist and well-known figure in feminist, immigrant, and labor circles, is uniquely poised to make her case: that the labor of immigrant women worker-activists not only sustains families and communities, but the vibrant social activism that undergirds democracy itself.
With chapters on successful campaigns against Levi-Strauss, Donna Karan, and restaurants in Los Angeles; Koreatown, among others.
Miriam Ching Yoon Louie is a longtime writer/activist in campaigns to organize women of color. She is national campaign media director of Fuerza Unida, a board member of the Women of Color Resource Center, and former media director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. Her essays and articles on immigrant women and labor issues have been widely anthologized, including in the 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press) and she speaks at public events internationally. She is the co-author, with Linda Burnham, of Women's Education in the Global Economy (Women of Color Resource Center, 2000).
Customer Reviews:
Sweatshops from the workers' perspective.......2004-04-30
I teach a course on Women and Work and Miriam Ching Louie's Sweatshop Warriors is the first book I have found that really describes sweatshops from the workers' perspectives, as agents rather than victims. The students really got it. I plan to use the book in this course from now on.
A more sinister side of globalization.......2001-10-29
Miriam Ching Yoon Louie has a literary talent in exposing the ill effects of globalization on poor women of color in the American garment industry. Focusing on Chinese, Korean, and Mexican immigrants she documents how their labor is continuously being exploited without regard to their personal well-being. Transnational corporations seek their labor because it is cheap. It is these women who are the backbones of the forces of globalization and their stories need to be told. An added strength of this book is that the author doesn't just focus on the negative structural aspects but she also includes multiple instances of how these workers create social solidarity and fight for social change in their favor, even when up against the odds. Her personal involvement in these social movements is an added benefit. These poor women of color both produce and reproduce globalization on the local and global scale. It leaves one with the belief that there is hope after all for a fair and just world. This book will make you reevaluate the 'promises' of free trade agreements and economic growth. As one group prospers there is surely another group being disadvantaged. Overall, this book is accessible especially in discussions on the feminization of labor and migration that is not cluttered with jargon. Go ahead and take a gamble. I hope that it will alter your social stance on these important issues as it reinforced mine.
In My Personal Top Ten.......2001-07-26
During my vacation, I've been reading "Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory" by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie. Miriam has a multi-decade organizing history with low income women of color. She is the co-founder of the Women of Color Resource Center in Berkeley, and author of an amazing trainers' manual called WEdGE" Women's Education in the Global Economy."
"Sweatshop Warriors" is one of my personal top ten books on radical organizing. It looks at transnational sweatshops through the eyes of Korean, Chinese and Mexican women forced to leave their homes of origin to take super exploited labor jobs in the world's sweatshops, ending up in the garment rows of NY, Oakland, LA, El Paso, etc. And there they have stood and fought. Against incredible odds, they've led international campaigns against the sweatshops industries, formed multi-purpose women workers centers, dealt with men in their families who were sometimes less than supportive of their activism, and learned to be world traveling organizers.
The author mixes political economy, analysis, history, and the herstories of the women organizers she has interviewed. Race/class/gender/nationality -- all come into play in the lives and organizing work of these incredible women.
Customer Reviews:
Original print version.......2001-10-24
I first read this book (original printing) as a college student for a class on the social situation in developing countries. This book is excellent. While brief, it gives an excellent introduction into the working conditions of women in sweatshops. Many black and white photos. While the book is slightly dated it is sad to note that the working conditions have not changed much.
I read the book again before being sent overseas to address problems developing at my company's factories. While being chartered to fix the technical problems, it was beneficial to be aware of the social issues. I hope my successors continue to influence management to make social improvements.
Read the book then do what you can to improve our planet.
Average customer rating:
|
Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Marketplace.(Book review): An article from: Journal of East Asian Studies
Calvin Chen
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
 Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Audiobooks
| Automotive
| Crime & Criminals
| Current Events
| Economics
| Education
| Foreign Language Nonfiction
| Government
| Holidays
| Law
| Philosophy
| Politics
| Social Sciences
| Transportation
| True Accounts
| Urban Planning & Development
| Women's Studies
Puns & Wordplay
| Humor
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Nonfiction
| HTML
| Formats
| e-Docs
| Formats
| Books
ASIN: B000NVJN8Q
Release Date: 2007-02-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of East Asian Studies, published by Thomson Gale on September 1, 2006. The length of the article is 987 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Marketplace.(Book review)
Author: Calvin Chen
Publication:
Journal of East Asian Studies (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 6
Issue: 3
Page: 468(3)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Oral History Review, published by Oral History Association on June 22, 2003. The length of the article is 892 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory.(Book Review)
Author: Teresa Bergen
Publication:
The Oral History Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 2003
Publisher: Oral History Association
Volume: 30
Issue: 2
Page: 138(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Books:
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
- It's Hard to Be Five: Learning How to Work My Control Panel
- Joy In Mudville: The Big Book of Baseball Humor
- La Economia Social En El Norte y En El Sur
- Life and Health Insurance: License Exam Manual (Life and Health Insurance License Exam Manual)
- Lip Service : 50 Humorous Stories of the Worst Customer Service in America and Interviews with the 10 Best Companies in the World
- Loose Lips
- Los Costes del Desarrollo Economico
- Magic Tree House Boxed Set 1, Books 1-4: Dinosaurs Before Dark, The Knight at Dawn, Mummies in the Morning, and Pirates Past Noon
- Max's ABC
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- White Ghost Girls
- The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage
- India 2020; a Vision for the New Millennium
- Libellus Sanguinis 2: Keepers of the Word
- Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada
- Reading, Writing and Learning in ESL: A Resource Book for K-12 Teachers
- Russia Export - Import and Business Directory
- Introduccion Al Estudio de La Contabilidad 2: Edic
- Measuring Up: Challenges Minorities Face in Educational Assessment
- Always Accept Me for Who I Am: Instructions from Teenagers on Raising the Perfect Parent by 147 Teen
Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents
For Lesbian Parents: Your Guide to Helping Your Family Grow Up Happy, Healthy, and Proud
The Lesbian Parenting Book: A Guide to Creating Families and Raising Children
Heather Has Two Mommies (Alyson Wonderland)
