What does it mean to be a feminist today? Should women require special legislation to protect them from sexual harassment? Daphne Patai's controversial look at the nation's current epidemic of sexual harassment charges answers these questions and illuminates complex ideological struggles within contemporary feminism. By investigating the ongoing attempts to regulate sexual conduct, Heterophobia argues that women's pursuit of a "comfortable" environment has created a feminist-induced hostility toward men and heterosexuality. Patai identifies the origins and evolution of "the sexual harassment industry," and she presents cases of those men and women whose lives were ruined by false or frivolous charges of harassment. A scathing criticism of political and sexual "correctness," this thought-provoking and powerfully argued book is sure to incite debate among all Americans concerned with the legacy and future of women's rights.

In The Fantasy of Feminist History , Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

Three decades after the remarkable resurgence of feminism, gender issues have become ubiquitous in public debate. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects the competing images of women´s lives today. Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failures of three decades of women´s activism. Why Feminism? looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women´s Liberation at the close of the 1960s to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Exploring feminism´s troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity, Why Feminism? illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.