This collection of essays, stories, poems and extracts of feminist writings is inspirational, contemporary and definitely up-beat. It speaks from women across cultures, ages, professions, class status, sexualities, location and abilities and therefore speaks to a diverse audience. This anthology unites forty-three feminist writers, providing smooth links, depth of experience and a transhistorical sense of womanhood and female struggle. The editors have broad horizons: to present a diversity of young women, not-so-young women and young feminisms (12). Their aim is to bridge the gap and challenge ideas and expectations that older feminisms and feminists have constructed about the new generation of women and girls, while giving the new feminists space and recognition. The terms young and old are described as ambiguous, masking complex relationships and identities about what feminism stands for. Mitchell, Bryn Rundle and Karanian present the introduction as a conversation between themselves, answering questions and debating the purpose and momentum of the project. This brave new style is not only admirable, successful and informative, but it allows us to begin to understand just why young feminism(s)‚ are something academia, activists, culture and politics cannot afford to ignore.

The book is divided into four parts. "My First Feminisms" starts off the journey by providing a platform for writers to present stories of first encounters with discrimination, oppression and injustice, as well as role models, inspiration and hope. Original and passionate accounts of the discovery of the meaning of womanhood in modern industrial society reminds us that the progress made towards equality‚ is borne out of the struggle of women before us. The second part, "Expanding Identities," invites the reader into intimate spaces of everyday practices, challenges and contradictions of women's lives. How everyday encounters have shaped, re-formed and changed women's identities are presented in a fresh and gripping genre. Loretta Gerlach reminds the reader why we are feminists:

"Schooling Feminisms" draws together writings that analyse how women learn to be feminists, how we teach each other and communicate in a spatially diverse community. This section reflects diversity in feminist politics, action and struggle in everyday life. How women's voices are expressed is demonstrated through graffiti, on-line feminist communities, teaching, music and culture shock! The final part of the book, "Fun Feminist Activities," are stories that describe resistance, exploration, action and protests; small steps that make significant symbols in personal and public space. Media, education, music, campaigning and new technologies are exposed as arenas where women successfully express and challenge dominant ideologies, gender socialization and cultural taboo's. Seven year old Madelyne Beckles describes an important theme of the book - Girl Power: "it's something that makes a girl a girl and sometimes inside you feel scared but outside you just do what you need to do and it doesn't make you afraid to be a girl" (340).

There are many extras‚ in the book that are both pleasing and engaging. The glossary is thorough and necessary, not only for readers unfamiliar with Canadian culture, but for those of us who are a little removed from the turbo chick language of the new generation of girls and women. Each of the forty three writers are given space to list their "Top 10 Feminist Influences," along with a biographical note. This not only gives the reader a deeper sense of who is writing these pieces, but also sparks off personal searches such as "who influenced me?" and "when did it all start?" Best of all, writers contribute their definition of feminism, what the ideology means to them, and how it should be used. This individuality drives home to new‚ and old‚ feminists the message that is often muffled or missing in many writings: that feminism is about choice and choosing; that feminism is available whenever, wherever and however we need it. These innovative extras provide the reader with so much more than is written on the page.

This collection of feminist writings is intimate, reflective, and hopeful, reviving many important issues. Its readership should mirror the diversity of the content and speaks directly to those tired of digesting theory and want context, voice, examples and inspiration.

Don't be put off by the dense introduction or the hyper-academic, two-colon-title - only a moderate understanding of contemporary critical theory is necessary to appreciate Jan Campbell's Arguing With the Phallus. Since her work is strongly grounded in the corporeal psychoanalytic theories of Luce Irigaray, those with a penchant for 1980's French feminism will especially enjoy the tone of the book. However, it is the breadth, not the depth of Campbell's writing which is most striking - she summarizes the work of a number of diverse thinkers with surprising clarity and skill. The premise of the book is that clinical psychoanalysts must learn to situate their practice at the crossroads of (linguistic) theory and (bodily) experience. This, claims Campbell, will help analysts escape the limitations of the Oedipal model and castration complexes that govern classical psychoanalysis and instead create a more comprehensive understanding of patients' alternate, individual realities. To ensure her readers arrive at the same conclusion, Campbell systematically outlines her thought process, abstracting key arguments from each of the various critical schools of thought then weaving them into an overview of contemporary theoretical debates now raging in academic and psychoanalytic circles.

The first two chapters provide an historical account of Freudian psychoanalysis, its relation to politics, the troubling ambiguity of Freud's linguistic and bodily realities, and the ensuing debates this uncertainty has caused identity theorists. Campbell examines the contrast between object relations theories that privilege bodily experience as the key to the formation of a physically located concept of the self, and poststructuralist accounts of identity that view the self as a fictional, ego-driven illusion. She questions the necessity for such a strong division between the two camps and posits a third, more fluid option that sees personal identity as an ever-shifting product of lived, bodily experience and analytic narrative accounts of the self.

Chapters three and four extend this personal multiplicity to feminism. Campbell highlights the antagonism between claims for an innate biological essentialism that determines female sexuality and identity, and the claims that such identity is constructed and culturally specific. Again, Campbell argues for a third alternative that incorporates aspects of both.

The fifth chapter examines what happens when queer theory and subsequent constructions of personal and political identity enter into the debate. The traditional psychoanalytic position that any orientation other than white, male and heterosexual is pathological or psychotic (132) leads Campbell to wonder in frustration why "so many contemporary theorists see the Oedipal as inevitable?"(146). Chapter six explores the specific ways in which gay desire is structured by and through social institutions and chapter seven addresses issues of race and postcolonial identity. She notes,

The final chapter provides an example of just what sort of alternative she envisions. Presenting a reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Campbell declares that authors whose "ethnographic reading of cultural history does not locate the unconscious in terms of a phallic linguistic metaphor, but as an unspeakable and narrative bodily experience of the real" (234) offer a glimpse of the alternate histories and realities that generate our collective cultural narratives. Campbell's final chapter however, is not sufficient to convince me that those who have traditionally existed outside of the norms posited by contemporary psychoanalysts have a natural, immediate recognition of, and revolutionary response to, the hegemonic Oedipal discourse. On the other hand, her ideas are certainly interesting ones, and Campbell has managed to produce a surprisingly comprehensive reference point for anyone whose interests include feminism, queer, post-colonial, cultural, literary or psychoanalytic theory.

Postgraduate Research Supervision: Transforming R(E)lations is both an interesting, thoughtful book and an enjoyable light read. This book contains essays and articles from nearly 50 different contributors -- postgraduate students and supervisors. In the essays and articles, the authors discuss their experiences, explore pedagogy, relay personal stories and insights and engage in critical thinking. Generally, the articles attempt to look at different postgraduate research supervision paradigms to probe how students and supervisors can reshape these relations. They explore how candidates can open dialogue with their supervisors regarding expectations, goals, working relationships, etc. in the hopes of transforming these relationships. At the same time, the articles expose the challenges students and supervisors face when working together. Some of the articles are quite thought provoking and helpful, while some of the short essays read more like a cathartic release than an educational piece. Nonetheless, most are pleasurable to read. Most, if not all, of the contributors are based in educational institutions in Australia, so its application can be somewhat limiting. In addition, the book is mostly written for Ph.D. candidates; however, even as a Masters candidate, I found it useful. It made me think about how I might have approached my supervisor differently and gave me resources I could have read to help me explore what I needed in a supervisor. This will prove helpful if I decide to continue on to my Ph.D.

One article in particular was of interest to me - "Novice at Forty: Transformation or Re-invention?" In this article, the authors Jo Balatti and Hilary Whitehouse explore their experiences as "mature-aged postgraduate[s]." They discuss the changes in their lives from career women in established positions to full-time doctoral students and how those changes impacted their feelings of self-worth, respect and confidence. The shift from professional worker to novice student resulted in the reinvention of their selves. Perhaps these experiences are unique to "older" students (for which I qualify), but I suspect that the feelings and experiences resonate with all students on some level as they reflect on their own transformations as graduate students.

I really enjoyed another article, "Mostly Metaphors: Theorizing from a Practice of Supervision", by the editors Alison Bartlett and Gina Mercer, in which the authors discuss how to establish a "new" supervisor/student relationship. Drawing on feminist and poststructural analysis, the authors explore the uniqueness of the supervisor-candidate one-on-one relationship. Rather than accepting the traditional model of supervision, based on the hierarchical power relationship in which the supervisor "educates" the uneducated, unknowing student, these authors (as well as other authors in the book) look at alternative relationships paradigms. Relying on some wonderful metaphors (e.g., "Cooking up a Feast," "Planting a Garden," and "Bushwalking"), the authors encourage the reader to envision a new framework for postgraduate supervision.

In another interesting article, "Imagining a Ph.D. Writers Body Grappling Over Pedagogy," Tai Peseta explores how and whether the Ph.D. is a "disembodied project" (84). If one's body is "different" or seen as "different", how does that shape the individuals experiences and interactions? Through this discussion, the author forces us to recognize how our bodies impact our experiences and how, in fact, we are thus racialized, gendered, and located.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I found some essays stronger and more interesting than others, but most gave me things to think about and avenues to explore. It is a light, enjoyable read, making it a pleasant break from the often complex, exhausting reading we often do in our graduate work. It is both practical and fun.

Jumpin' Jim Crow is an intriguing anthology of essays about the ways in which whites and African Americans struggled to redefine southern politics and society in the century following the Civil War. Taken together, these essays assert that for both white and Black southerners, politics has long been the institutionalization of intersecting race, gender and class conventions. The introduction states, "Jim Crow was at bottom a social relationship" (4). Rather than depict politics as a purely rational, transparently strategic, objective process, these authors argue that politics is a highly subjective, varied expression of social beliefs and values; it is the way in which people's reactions to changing social conventions give rise to and become embedded within formal structures of power.

Jumpin' Jim Crow successfully unites the social and the political, in part because all of the authors embrace gender as a central analytical category for studying the late nineteenth and twentieth-century South. They suggest that after the Civil War, southern African Americans faced a power structure forced to retool in order to entrench white men's dominance in a society that no longer distinguished people as either slaves or free, and in which - at least for a short period of time - electoral politics was no longer solely white men's domain. In this context, white male dominance was not merely a matter of formal political rights. It was also fundamentally social, as white men's supremacy was linked inextricably to such issues as their guardianship of white womanhood and their self-proclaimed role as masters of southern civilization. This remained the case into the twentieth century. Formal politics and personal, identity politics were thus two sides of the same coin, in that formal politics institutionalized the subjectivities - the social aspirations, insecurities, and locations - of its constituents.

The authors in Jumpin' Jim Crow highlight the links between the personal, social, and political most compellingly in their discussions of African American resistance to Jim Crow. They suggest that African Americans confronted racism and challenged segregation in diverse ways, employing techniques that most would agree were traditionally political as well as some that might at first seem to fall outside the political sphere. For instance, Kari Frederickson notes that the African American Progressive Democratic Party challenged segregated politics and was one of the factors that provoked the formation of the States' Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, when it sent delegations to the Democratic National Conventions in 1944 and 1948. Grace Elizabeth Hale argues that African Americans who chose to shop via mail-order catalogues also challenged white power by thwarting general storekeepers‚ attempts to control their behaviour and their economic status.

Taken in its own context, the first instance seems almost indisputably political, but what of the second? In her discussion of the segregation of consumption, Hale states:

This kind of broad focus, which is in play throughout this anthology, seems particularly important in terms of the trajectory of southern historiography. While many of the essays are blatantly critical of white supremacy and white men (and justifiably so) this book is not about condemnation. The point is not to indict particular people for the failure or deficiency of the South. In the introduction, the editors establish their framework with the following statement:

If southern history is all about failure, insofar as we would consider segregation to be a failure of American aspirations to democracy and poverty a failure of the liberal economic tradition, that could mean that the only agents of any consequence were the white men at the forefront of formal politics and business. Everyone else merely received the poor results of troubled political decisions and economic realities. But the authors in Jumpin' Jim Crow propose a rather different argument for a more widespread view of human agency. Whites did not have completely free reign over Blacks in spite of their dominant position, and subordination did not mean that African Americans, or white women, were passive. Even as they faced victimization, the oppressed were still agents of history. Their relative oppression did not limit their attempted or actual social impact. In their many failed efforts to cast ballots, as well as their successful bids for access to social space and, in the case of African Americans, for equal buying power, they defined their own lives, constructed institutions of their own - institutions that Elsa Barkley Brown suggests were rife with their own contradictions and complexities - and actively pushed those with more power to react and to change.

Furthermore, individual situations, seen through different eyes, could be both backward‚ and progressive‚ at the same time. In the case of William Northen's antilynching campaign in Georgia, David Godshalk writes, "Whereas Northen sought to recover the lost antebellum world of his youth, [William Jefferson] White and other elite Black males hoped to create a new racial order - one that would nurture their goals of self-determination and full equality" (157). Although Northen's "vision for Georgia's future never transcended his memories of its past" (157), and although his antilynching efforts were not successful, there were people who seized on Northen's campaign as an opportunity and saw in it a glimmer of hope. In this sense, the history of the Jim Crow South is neither the disparaging story of stasis or regression, nor the romantic one of New South progressivism, but a narrative of choices and activity, and ongoing, simultaneous contestation and consensus.